


evergreen

by bogbats



Category: Guild Wars 2 (Video Game)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Cultural Differences, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Getting to Know Each Other, Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns, Heart of Thorns Spoilers, Interracial Relationship, Pining, Psychological Warfare, Size Difference, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-09-21 01:19:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 54,439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17033632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bogbats/pseuds/bogbats
Summary: Love deeply, and without remorse. In the garden of Niikolais' heart, a wild norn woman builds her home amongst the flowers.





	evergreen

**Author's Note:**

> Merry Christmas, antiicarus, a year and a half late (whoops)!

i. the shiverpeaks

 

In the days long past, in the time of the Great Destroyer, and before the movement of the world, there had once been forged an alliance among the races. Asura, dwarf, human, and norn. The age had been built on a precipice, and though there was no promise of victory for those that found the courage to jump, destruction had pressed at the backs of every Tyrian alive. 

It had been a time for heroes.

It was then that the humans of that time had met with the norn and found them brave but proud allies. And when all existence spread thin, there, deep below the earth, dwarves and norn had learned that their delves and mountains would not spare them an ignoble end should any one of them fail.

Though the dwarves are now a race lost to history, the norn remain a people of custom. Their fondness for ale is eclipsed only by their love of battle, and their love of battle pales only to their desire for legend. And as far back as any skaald can hearken to, it has always been that the unsung go unremembered, blood washes blood, and two norn must be equal in legend if they are to wed.

For some, this eidolon would rest cold and heavy, uncontested by any ghost story.

⸙⸙⸙

A silver and a half. That is what a dozen tanned and trimmed pelts are worth. A silver and a half.

Jyte knows that worse had used to fetch for better. Something must have changed in Lion’s Arch since last she’d passed through, an upset in the market at the hands of another greedy asura—or, as happens more often of late, adventurers who’d stockpiled what they could before a change in the wind, adventurers who could afford to undercut the local traders. 

Though the city still sits comfortable in a summer’s heat, here and at home in Timberline Falls, she wakes to the whispers of a blistering winter in the making. Anyone who brings their goods from places abroad would know that, too.

She waves off the Lionguard whose arms she has filled with pelts. They don’t wait to start comparing them, probably each hoping that they hold the warmest one. The sight makes her laugh.

“Best if you skip the dance and share them, boys! You’re thinking it’s cold now, but it’ll be colder once the weather changes.”

“Speak for yourself, Jyte!” Raleigh calls from the ramparts. He is one of the few humans stationed at Junction Haven and wears a scarf wrapped around everything but the eyes to fend with the cold. A Krytan man through and through. “We remember how cold it was last year. Scion isn’t even for another month, maybe more, and I can already hardly feel my nose...”

“Are you sure it hasn’t fallen off under all that?” She taps her own nose with a wink, then sobers. “I’ve spoken to Wolf, so should he see fit to smile on my hunt, you’ll see me again before the leaves turn colour. If you can make it that long.”

“We’ll make it,” grunts the charr sheriff, stepping forward to test a pelt with his claw, which is more a polite show of interest than it is necessity. It isn’t often that a charr finds themselves in want for a blanket. “But so long as you keep bringing us your wares, we’ll keep buying ‘em. Budget permitting, of course.”

This is the first she’s heard of any budget. Something _has_ come up at port, then. Haggling doesn’t do any good when it comes to the Lionguard, though, so she shoulders her pack, shrugging grandly, and pockets the coin. They jingle-jangle merrily with the copper she’d made last the entire journey out.

Almost enough on her now that she could afford to take a waypoint, though Jyte doesn’t much care to use them. It’s just a passing thought: goes to show that anything an asura is willing to share is going to cost you. It’s going to be strange. And in the case of the waypoints, they’re going to make her head feel topsy-turvy when they spit her out. No, thanks.

“You can count on Hallesdottir or myself,” she says idly, still thinking about waypoints, “whichever one of us is first to find a decent hunt.”

Lauga, another norn, whistles at her. It’s shrill, like a raven’s call. “You tell Kelda I’ll pay double for any salted meats the two of you can bring this way before the equinox hits. I’m getting tired of fighting dredge for scraps.” 

She leans against a shield so tall and broad that a human could use it as a door.

“Yeah…” Raleigh sighs up above. He worries the tip of his dagger back and forth in the wooden beams. “Urtt caught a handful of ‘em burrowing into the storeroom last week. They made off with half the rations before he ran them out. We’re still working on caving in the hole.”

That explains the boot hill she’d passed coming in. Jyte hadn’t bothered to investigate; she’d assumed it’d either be ettins or dredge lying inside. Wise of them to dig a winter site well before the frost, before the soil freezes, but she’s surprised they’ve gotten to filling it so early, too. Dredge are usually smarter than that.

A change is coming.

“Anything else?” she asks.

They know better than to take it as generosity. It isn’t a short trek to Kryta, not even for the norn; everything she has to sell, she’ll make sure gets sold.

“Yeah,” Tornmuzzle says, joining her there in the shadow of the mountain. “Knock a couple ettins around on your way back, would ya? Those bastards are getting out of hand.”

Jyte thumbs a cut on her cheek. It will yellow and smell before healing, but it won’t take very long to get there. She sealed it with troll’s unguent. “I busted some heads already, but you got it. I’ll add a few more to the pile.”

The charr flicks his tail. “They’ve been migrating towards us, trying to find food. We’re losing sleep listening to one head argue with the other until the crack of dawn. It’s like bunking next to some Iron cogs who won’t quit snarling over pipes and pistons. You’d be doing us a favour—just don’t expect any songs to come of it.”

Songs, huh… She exhales a laugh and gives him a narrowed, down-the-nose look. When it comes to speaking to the other races, it’s rare a norn finds anyone she can look at dead-on. Anger at least, doesn’t come to her quite as quickly as it does to many of her kin.

“Because killing ettins for the Lionguard is what you call song-work, is it?”

After a moment of mulling over norn temperaments, Tornmuzzle grumbles and amends his stance to, “ _Normally_ it’d be Lionguard work, but our hands are full with the dredge, and we’ve got some caravans due to pass through soon. Truth is, the way it’s looking now, doubtful that the merchants are gonna make it through in one piece. Their dolyaks might.”

“Maybe I should think about enlisting,” she comments, with absolutely zero intention of enlisting. The mountains call to her every night, a hiemal lament, and her heart always, _always_ aches to answer. “Earn some coin for my trouble.”

The sheriff appraises her anyway. “Hahaha. Maybe you should.”

“She knows better than that, Rollak,” Lauga scoffs. She has made her living selling tools to the haven and the vineyards to the west and is free to come and go as she pleases. “Nobody’s going to be singing songs about Junction Haven unless you write one yourself.”

“I think anything we could come up with would end up a ballad.” Raleigh’s voice echoes in the narrow pass. “Oh—how about this: ‘The Sad Story of the Storeroom Stash’?”

Lauga, with the air of teasing a fond and absent friend, says, “‘The Woeful Tale of Urtt Dredge-Chaser’,” and toasts Raleigh’s snigger with the wineskin on her belt.

“Alright,” Tornmuzzle growls, “if you wordsmiths’ve got any last requests, get ‘em in now before I send the lady on her way.”

Jyte’s brow ticks.

“I think I’m fine to decide when I best depart, sheriff.” Her voice is firmer without the heat of anger to cook it through, and that is the difference. Her rage comes more slowly, a slow-moving fire. “Salted meats and ale for the lady, and a couple more dead ettins for the charr. Looks like I’ve got my work cut out for me.”

She turns and starts towards Molenheide to the north, beyond which is Vollym’s fighting pit, and a clearing where she can usually rustle up a wild hare or two. 

She calls, “Since I’ll be supping here tonight, should I do you another favour and take out a few dozen dredge, too?” throwing her voice over her shoulder like a trophy discarded, and whatever answer the Lionguard might have for her is lost to the sound of her bellowing laugh as she jingle-jangles ‘round the bend.

⸙⸙⸙

“Stop your whining, I’ve found some.” Grinning, Jyte knocks the snow from a cluster of taproots and pulls them free. “These’ll do nicely, huh?” she asks Suvi, who does not look up from grooming her paws even when she shakes them off over her head.

A rabbit already hangs skinned and cooking above the fire she’s lit. Gendarran rabbits are leaner than the ones further north. Don’t need the same fat to get by that the true winter hares do—so a few parsnips will do the job of making it into a proper meal.

Jyte ties their stems to the spit and whistles. “Why don’t you see if you can find another rabbit, while we’re waiting?” she asks Suvi.

Suvi yanks a tuft of fur from between her toes.

“I saw one running around just a few minutes ago.” The bond between a norn and their pet lies in communication that doesn’t have to happen aloud. But Jyte likes to talk to Suvi anyways. “Go on.” She jerks her head to the side and gives another whistle, and Suvi finally obeys, taking off into the bush with a spray of powdery snow flying behind her.

Jyte laughs, squatting down, and turns the rabbit’s underside to the flame. “That’s what I thought.”

For a while, there’s nothing more. Vollym’s pit sits quiet. But finally, when the light has begun to dim and the rabbit has begun to pull off the bone, Jyte lifts her head to watch for Suvi’s return and sees a cherry tree walking towards her instead.

No, she realizes: it isn’t a _tree_. It’s a sylvari.

“Ya hey there!” She cups a hand to her mouth. “Are you lost?”

The sylvari glances her way and raises their wooden brow at her. 

They’ve always interested her, sylvari. She’d still been young when they first appeared in Tyria and gone off in search of whatever it is that plant people go searching for. She hasn’t learned much about them since.

The one she’s looking at now is lavender-coloured and slight of frame. Most sylvari are. A cascade of fronds sprouts from their hairline, and though she has to squint to see them, their cheeks are dotted with tiny thorns. Against the pristine snowfields, they are a bruise of colour.

And, as it would turn out, a bruise of personality, too.

“Do I strike you as lost?” they ask in a clear, strong voice, and after a moment’s consideration, Jyte discerns it to be masculine. “If so, I must insist I am not, for I have chosen to come here the same as you, though I’m sure we have very different reasons for that.”

It seems like that could be an insult, if she chose to read it that way. Jyte curiously gives him the benefit of the doubt and does not.

“You strike me as someone in need of a fire and a meal,” she replies easily. “You would be surprised how quickly the sun falls behind these mountains.”

“Would I?” He turns his face skyward at her indication and follows the line of low peaks that cradle this side of Gendarran. They are but the foothills of the Shiverpeaks, but for those who never get further than the Almuten estates, she’s sure they’re a pinnacle.

“Then have you got plans to move any further east?” 

“I might,” he says, frowning delicately at the cliffs. 

“Well, little one, I can’t speak for the vine you came from, but plants with your colouring don’t often root in the Shiverpeaks expecting to blossom again come spring. At least not without some shelter.” She points at him with the charred branch she’s been using as a poker. “Come, join me by the fire.”

He hesitates, but finally approaches and pauses at the fireside. Jyte thinks it is a surprising amount of reluctance there in the slope of his shoulders. From what she’d been told, it was almost always a losing battle to keep a sylvari at arm’s length, but not so with this one, who seems that he would be quite content to keep her at an arm’s length at the least.

But manners and hospitality are oft the only warmth you will find in the Shiverpeaks, so Jyte pulls her pack aside, should he wish to take a seat, and sucks the fat and grease from her fingers before she offers them to shake.

“Jyte,” she says cheerfully. “Of the glacier.”

The look he gives her hand is nearly enough to break her. But if he is repelled by that idea, then he won’t be much fonder of being laughed at. Still, he does sit, though she can tell that her solemnity needs work because he frowns and primly folds his hands in his lap.

“Niikolais.”

 _Would you look at that,_ she thinks, with some satisfaction. _I guess that means introductions have been made._ Conversations on the wayside don’t always get this far, not least of all in these nebulous moments between day and dusk.

Food and a fire help with that, sometimes, when the stars align and a band of adventurers meet along the road full to bursting with tales they want to tell. But the sylvari doesn’t seem interested in bridging that divide.

“Well met, then,” she says while she pulls her glove back on. “What business _might_ a sylvari have in the Shiverpeaks?”

“Priory business.”

Jyte adjusts a collapsing log with her booted heel. “Priory business, eh… I’m set to travel southwards through Lornar’s Pass, myself. You’ve got a long trek ahead of you before you see first sign of those hallowed halls.”

The sylvari frowns deeper. It’s a strange thing to watch unfold on someone whose features are wooden. “Surely not that long. The way is tended by the Lionguard.”

“So is all of this,” she says, gesturing, “and there’s plenty here you’ll find can pose a danger, if you don’t know the way. Shouldn’t you have a caravan with you?”

Sometimes she wonders how the lone merchants that wander the Lion Road fare. Not all of them wind up following the detours.

He takes his time to answer. “I’m sure I would have been given leave to take one,” is what he settles on, at last, “had I asked, but I wished to make the journey myself. I would rather be here and on my own than still arranging to leave Divinity’s Reach.”

Jyte leans forward and rests her cheek on the knuckles of a balled-up hand. They scatter all over like seeds, the sylvari, but it always piques her interest when someone from the last free human city comes looking to test their mettle against the frost and snow.

“Made the long trek from the Reach, huh… I’m impressed.” She gives him a new appraisal, one that extends past his features and lingers on the peculiar armour he wears. Violet and bark-like, it is, so he must have grown it himself. “I would’ve thought you’d stick a little closer to home.”

“You mean peddling mercantile in Lion’s Arch?” he asks, fleetingly humoured. “I’m afraid not. My duties lie in diplomacy, not haberdashery.”

If she remembers right, they have ‘wardens’ down their stretch of the Tarnished Coast. Just a sylvari-sounding name for the same peacekeepers all the great cities invariably wound up in need of. Jyte’s pretty sure, too, that there are no wardens as far north as Divinity’s Reach. She’d wager that the ministry wouldn’t take too kindly to a fourth militia shouldering its way in.

Only humans could convince themselves that they needed three in the first place.

“Well. You’re not Lionguard,” she comments, “and not Seraph. So that makes you…” 

Even though it feels particularly apt, she stops herself from saying ‘noble’. 

“Some kind of emissary?”

Almost absently, the sylvari leans to turn the rabbit on its spit. “That’s right; I am an ambassador of the Pale Tree to Kryta. My duty is to facilitate a fair and peaceful relationship between the sylvari and the human kingdom.”

“Hm. I forget you all make a regular affair of that representative stuff.”

“Yes.” He suddenly cools. “We do.”

Touchy subject, huh. Jyte bites her thumb and gets a taste of the charcoal rubbed into the leather. “Alright, well,” she sighs after a moment of thoughtfully tonguing her teeth, “this… trip to the Priory—it’s something you’re expected to do, as part of all that?”

He gets a faraway look, like he can see himself there among the books already, instead of squatting here by firelight and waiting for a rabbit to cook. “I have favours to call in on behalf of a colleague.” 

“Wow, favours from the steward? Isn’t he asura? I’m surprised your friend didn’t want to make the trip themselves.”

He must not appreciate the grin and raised brow she delivers that with, because he straightens as though he sits upon a throne and not a felled stump, and fields the remark with a keen and direct stare. The sun has gone low enough that she can see the sparks of light travelling along the veins in his eyes.

“Am I right to think that there is something specific you’re hoping gets said, here?” he asks, his words tightening like a hunter’s bowstring as she lines up her shot. “If it suits you, you are free to cut to the chase, and I shall respond with as much honesty as I know how.”

Jyte leans her weight onto her far leg and shifts to face him, one heel braced in the knot of a broken branch. Leisurely, she says, “No, I’m just—thinking aloud. Say, aren’t there those… asura gates in Lion’s Arch that’d drop you right on the Priory’s doorstep?”

The sylvari exhales a puff of breath. “Yes, I’m well aware, but I rather meant what I said about preferring to be _here_.”

At last they’ve gotten to the true meat of the matter, and suddenly the hare Jyte has eagerly been waiting to cut into is the furthest thing from her mind. She speaks around a growing, excited grin: “Fine, fine, you got me. I’ll bite,” though she cannot be bothered to make herself sound _gotten_. “Have you ever been to the Shiverpeaks, little one?”

“—Niikolais. And I thought I’d made it quite clear that I have not.”

“Well, in that case…” Jyte whistles a sharp upward whistle, and a moment later glimpses Suvi over the sylvari’s shoulder. “You’re going to want a guide.”

He looks uncertain. “I’m sure that’s not necessary—” 

“Who said anything about necessary? Necessary is ‘get to the Priory’, and ‘call in those favours’. You’ll do all that whatever you settle on, but what you’re talking about doing right now, _being here_ , that is called adventure.” 

She laughs her anticipation aloud, tempering it to a chuckle down from the belly laugh it wants to be, and offers him a bone. “We’re both headed south; if you come with me through the valley, I can promise you safe passage, and we will pass by one of the shrines we have built in Raven’s name. Don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone but norn visiting ‘em.”

This clearly intrigues him, as she’d rightfully thought it might. Jyte can count on a single hand the number of sylvari she has personally spoken to, but it’s common knowledge how they hunger for new experience—as do her kin. She can respect that.

He thinks for a very long time. “You understand I cannot pay you for this,” he says pensively, after several moments have passed without either of them speaking; Suvi paces a few yards away, watching him, waiting for Jyte’s cue.

She silently gestures for her to heel. “That’s something else I said nothing of. You cut it from your mind—my coin’s already been made. Leading a sylvari down the same paths my forebears have walked will be more than enough to satisfy me.”

“Somehow, this all feels like the passing of your judgement,” he says, but if he’s considering arguing the point further, he stops at the consideration part.

“Maybe.” She thinks better of teasing him and reaches out a gloved hand so she can bring Suvi in by the scruff. He stiffens, recoiling as the cat drops something between them that had once belonged to an overgrown shrew. 

“Might I assume that the two of you are together?”

To the south, a discordant note wails from the dredging depths. 

“Aye, that we are,” says Jyte, and she knuckles the cat roughly beneath the ear until she begins to purr, “and starting with that bell, we’ll say the same goes for you.”

The sylvari lifts a brow and toes the piece of dredge into the fire. “Thank Ventari for that,” he says dryly.

⸙⸙⸙

She does not lie to him; he comes to the Priory unhurt, nursing only the soreness that comes with scaling mountains for the first time. It’s once they have departed again and Jyte has turned their route towards the wending trails and cliffside delves that trouble begins to arise.

It starts with the sylvari’s flagging pace. She has taken care to shorten her stride and to stop for rest far more frequently than she would on a journey that was hers alone. But despite the growing stillness and wilderness, he is uneasy, and she can tell it; he takes to scanning the hills like he expects an ambush—as though she would not hear one coming—but no matter how often she pins him under her gaze, he says nothing aloud.

Jyte figures he must be biding his time. Rehearsing it in his head, whatever issue he has taken. These are things she knows humans often do, and he seems much the same in that way. And so days pass, and they are well into the Godspurs before his argument satisfies him.

She leaves to hunt for the night’s sup and returns the victor, two hares in hand. Here, Jyte finds him huddled upon a low slab of stone. He had been squinting unhappily at the sun’s westward path with his arms and ankles crossed, but the moment she draws near, he opens his mouth and begins to speak.

“This is not the same way we took to get here.”

Jyte blows out her cheeks. “It’s not,” she agrees.

“ _Why_ not?”

“It doesn’t need to be. So long as you take care of where you step, all roads shall eventually lead you back home.”

He is not comforted. “I did not come here to find out which roads lead where; I simply needed to visit the Priory and return to Divinity’s Reach.”

“But shouldn’t you?” This seems to surprise him, so Jyte presses the advantage. “You are already here, and there is so much that would knock you breathless with awe, if you only took a detour to see it. You _wanted_ to see it. These trade roads…”—she lowers her voice to a disdainful mutter—“they’re here for convenience, efficiency… The beauty of these mountains, their real beauty, the beauty you _personally_ came here to behold—that is reserved for those who depart from the beaten path. I could show you. It would be nothing!”

The sylvari clicks his tongue and stares down the valley, narrow fingers curled tight around his own arms. Though she cannot fathom how a being of vine and sap could ever produce enough heat to do so, his breath hangs in the air.

“There’s no need to show me anything more; I am already knocked breathless where I stand.”

“You cannot compare the two.”

“Perhaps not, but my fingers don’t much care the difference.”

“Bear!” Frustrated, she falls into a squat and pulls her walking stick from the straps that bind it to her pack. “I’ll give you a moment to think on it.” 

She fetches her whittling knife next, and has resumed carving out an animal’s flank in the time it takes him to realize that camp has been definitively set.

For some reason, obscure even to her, she doesn’t want to relent. She wants to show him something so grand he cannot help but to smile, if anything yet exists that could make him. It feels like such a defiant waste of freedom and the sylvari’s collective youth to retrace their own footsteps and hurry him home.

“Please, Jyte, I don’t know what you want to hear. I said I wanted to get an _idea_ of what the Shiverpeaks are like—I made no mention of a weeks-long trek. I haven’t gone back on any word, so don’t act so betrayed.”

“You don’t need to talk like I’ve forced you to come this far.” She clips her voice before it becomes a fearsome thing fit to shake the trees. “Why did you not take the Priory’s gate back to Lion’s Arch? Why did you say nothing until now? I cannot tell your reluctance to enjoy yourself apart from your reluctance to be here at all. If you had said anything before we were _here_ , I would have gladly let you go!”

“Because, I—” he starts off sharply, then he too appears to take great pains to make his voice as soft and compelling as a breeze through spring leaves. He does not quite succeed at it. “I promise you, you won’t see it through quite the same lens. Mother, it—it saps my strength to be so cold.”

Jyte pauses, lifts her eyes from her work. He reminds her of a tree that has been strangled away from the sunlight by other, far bigger, trees. Though he is small and thin, he has been buffeted by the same winds and weathered the same storms, and through these things, has grown a bark thick enough to protect him from everything that would harm him.

She’s thought this a few times already. He is neither a sapling nor a proud oak, but a branchling somewhere between the two.

“Wolf’s teeth. Is that it? You’re too cold?”

It seems like so small a thing.

His frown, in profile, gets deeper. “I’d thought I might be able to stand it, before we left the Priory. But I have changed my mind.”

It seems so small a thing. Jyte is sure she’s seen sylvari walk barefoot alongside norn through Snowden and Wayfarer’s Peak—she’s sure she has.

Hasn’t she?

“Tell me again. You’ve no pressing business at the Reach, now that your Priory business is done?” She sets down her knife and begins to work the buckles keeping her wolfskin cloak in place.

“No,” he says, not looking at her, “Steward Gixx will have already opened correspondence with—”

“—There’s nothing else you’re needed for?”

“Again, not at _present_.”

Jyte nods to herself and shrugs the pelt from her shoulders. It’s as good as settled, then. “So, given a fire and the proper garments, you could find it in you to walk the land a little longer, couldn’t you?” she murmurs, and, crossing the distance to him in a single stride, she drops the cloak about him like a blanket.

He is already part-way through an incredulous, “You would call this an ‘exploration’?” when she does this, and everything that follows takes a turn for the flustered and terse: “I _beg_ your pardon!”

“You may have it, if you like,” says she, “but the cloak will serve you better.”

He has a peculiar way of speaking when his temper flares. It is a better reminder than anything else could be of the life she plucked him from. This sylvari isn’t like his kin, hoping to slake his wanderlust somewhere far beyond his home. He found his fit in the human queen’s entourage—and that entourage, Jyte knows, is peopled by those like the woman who bought another sylvari’s billet and now keeps him as a pet.

Human politics—it is full of mesmers and manipulators.

With a grunt, she shifts back onto her haunches and returns to carving. Runs her thumbs over the emerging shape. The wood had been dry when she salvaged it from the riverbank, but now it comes back to life, releasing the pleasant sharp smell of pine and sap. Before long, this walking stick will bear Suvi’s likeness forever.

He doesn’t speak for so long she thinks he’s been embarrassed into ignoring her. She has gotten none of the inquisitive smiles and floral adages that she thought to expect, and humour is given no place in their conversations. His boughs must be quite stern indeed, she imagines, beneath the sprawling weight of her pelt. What a wonder they haven’t snapped.

“This is nonsense,” he says at last, only when she’s stopped glancing towards him. “We both will look like fools, trading your coat between us.”

“That’s how we’ll look, is it?” she murmurs, easily, without looking up. “Never-mind that; keep it until you’ve warmed up. Go on.”

And under full Shiverpeak sun, the seams of his cheeks and brow take on a tepid glow. He asks, “Of all the times to demonstrate your people’s pride?” which has never quite been the insult others wish for it to be, though she has warmer feelings towards the sentiment when it comes from kindred mouths.

“Take a look around you, branchling,” she says. “This cold is our father, and these mountains our mother. We are born sheltered by the glacier that breaks our foes upon its spine. By these things we could never be felled—we are all of them, and we are norn. Look!”

Jyte takes a handful of snow and holds her fist aloft for him to see how quickly it melts between her fingers, as though she carries something molten beneath the skin. The branchling is watching her now.

He pretends otherwise, turning deeper into the coat, and as he does he mutters, “You _do_ seem the type who’d want the world to think that when they look at her.”

“—oh?” She claps her thigh so that it jostles him, barking a laugh. “Ha ha! Let the skaalds retell this moment by fire and by moonlight: a joke!”

He looks stung.

“It was not meant to be a joke.” He sinks impossibly lower and draws the furs so they sit tight around his neck. “It doesn’t matter. Your skaalds will have enough of a tale to tell about the woman who stole a sylvari away into the mountains she claims birthed her.”

“For all the weight your kin places upon a dream, you cannot possibly believe ours are grow no bigger than a walk through the wilds.” Jyte traces Suvi’s wooden flank. “Think beyond mountain and firn… My legend will be so much more than this, by the time comes that it bears a retelling.”

“That is a staggering amount of confidence you have in something so abstract.”

Her hands still for a moment, eyes falling to rest on the shape of him wrapped up and turned to the valley below. “Because that is our truth, little one. Norn do not stop seeking our legends until we attain them, or we die.”

“That’s too naive,” he says, though it takes a long time. “Not everyone is destined to walk a path of legend. Lives are cut short, to speak little of those who become men and women of farm or trade—for that reason, ‘where life goes, so too should you.’”

A strange turn of phrase. Jyte lets it hang over her for a moment too long. “Maybe that’s the way it is,” she admits, “if legend goes unsought, but that is not the way of the norn. We are known by our conquests and succeed or fail through our own measures. For me, that is enough reason to seek it. Such a life may be beyond you, branchling.”

As it has been for centuries beyond the grasp of humans, asura, and the charr. She doesn’t expect anyone to understand it, not at the heart of it, not if they are not norn, but this sylvari gets a sudden fire in his eyes when she says so.

“Ah. You think _me_ naive, then.”

His temper burns even hotter than his pride. That quality has a history of dooming people to an early grave. Biting her lip to quell a smile, she rolls her shoulders so that the need to meet the challenge in his voice with one of her own rolls off, like water from the waterfowl.

“You’re free to take it as you will, branchling.” She shifts her weight forward onto one elbow and gestures at him with the back of her knife, a motion he follows with wary eyes. “You’re grown and may begin whichever fights you wish.” 

“Do not call me _branchling,_ ” he snaps, but he pulls the pelt close around his neck. “Call me Niikolais or call me nothing.”

“Oh, no,” Jyte says, eyes glittering. “That’s something you will have to earn, like my respect. These are the vast norn lands that you wander now, little one. Best me, first, and then we shall talk as equals.”

——————————————

A test of mettle she doubts he has. 

Well, then, Niikolais thinks. That makes all the difference.

——————————————

Jyte keeps the branchling for a time. The transformation of days into weeks passes unremarked, though she doubts they pass unnoticed.

They take the paths few but the norn care to tread.

Wherever they go—so long as they walk the roads—asuran waypoints glisten at them like low-hanging stars. The blizzards have never managed to bury one in her lifetime, not even in the Sound, and though Jyte would rather travel the firn by her instincts alone, she has followed their ghostly light more than once, when she couldn’t tell the sky from the snow.

Niikolais gives them lingering looks when they pass—yet never suggests they use them.

“After all,” she’d said, “where is the adventure in simply _being_ at your destination, never feeling bite of the wind as it whistles through the peaks, never sleeping beneath a deadly wind-borne sky?”

She neglects to mention how steep the price. Surely a diplomat would not understand.

He picks his way delicately along the path. The way the sylvari move, as though they are an extension of the land, fascinates her; she can hear a human caravan coming from a league away, but not even the deer shy away when he walks past. They will never be norn, but given a little time, and some toughening up, the sylvari could easily walk astride.

So long as they don’t speak, the only sound is the rabbits thumping in their warrens and sometimes the crack of pine boughs breaking under their own snow-laden weight. Occasionally, a sheet of ice shatters in the distant mountaintops. The air itself is crystalline. 

Nowhere else in Tyria could hold a candle to what surrounds her, and by Raven, she wouldn’t want it to. This is her home, and it is rugged and free.

Maybe part of her hopes that the rugged and free will charm him in some way. Niikolais becomes one of the few among Tyria’s other races who have broken the ice skiffs rimming the Shiverpeaks’ frigid shores, who’ve left their footfalls behind in the crust of razor-sharp snow. Jyte leads him ever-higher into the mountains, where the air is so thin and cold that it would cut his insides as he breathed it, were he made from softer stuff.

She hasn’t any reason to worry about that, but like all trees unsuited to this clime, the sap in his veins threatens to freeze and snap. He keeps a hand at his throat, holding her cloak close around him and speaking little, for when he tries, the frigid air rushes down his throat and leaves him breathless.

“Tell me a tale. From your life, where you come from. Something that you’ve seen in your other travels.”

Niikolais, grazing his fingers over a tree trunk, looks surprised. And stern, always stern. “Unless I recall incorrectly, there’s little point in doing so, since I haven’t yet proven myself to be your equal.”

“Who has?” She laughs, like a bellows. “It will be boring if we simply walk in silence and never speak. Come, tell me a tale.”

The norn place the heaviest value upon the telling of stories, but there isn’t a soul in Tyria she’s met yet who won’t talk themselves up to anyone willing to listen.

“I feel for your equals if this is how you treat them,” he mutters, but he considers her request for a moment, then says, “I have a brother, and a sister—Naefula. She and I share our talent for the mesmeric.”

“Twin mesmers.” That strikes her familiar. “What about your brother?”

“Valthika.” A venomous-sounding name. Jyte lifts her brow, turning a curious eye towards him; his shoulders are hunched, arms crossed, face upturned. Troubled must be the thoughts going through his head. “He’s not what you would expect. Different from many sylvari that you would meet.”

He has also stopped walking, so Jyte follows suit and makes a vague prompting grunt.

“When we were younger, he abandoned the Dream and the Pale Tree. Sylvari who do this often say they wish to escape the burden it places upon them. They call themselves Soundless, to reflect how they have cut themselves off from our mother’s voice.”

“A burdensome dream?”

But he shakes his head minutely and answers with something completely different. “When the Pact was formed, Trahearne chose Valthika to command it. He led its soldiers, along with the surviving members of Destiny’s Edge, into Orr—and slew Zhaitan in its own domain.”

She doesn’t fail to notice that he mentions a guild of Eir Stegalkin’s founding. Though time and perspective and Eir’s own actions have rubbed the golden sheen from her legacy, there is no denying the many great things she has achieved. She stands as a testament to teamwork, to Wolf’s guidance, to ingenuity. Jyte purses her lips around a slight laugh. Diplomats. Nothing but honey and knives up their sleeves.

“Soundless, slayer of Zhaitan, Pact Commander…” All from a member of a race younger than her. “Your brother seems to have made quite the name for himself.”

“He has,” Niikolais murmurs. “Almost as though he makes a hobby of collecting them.”

It is still too early to discern what he means by that—and to speak in such a tone of voice, he surely must mean something.

“I asked for a tale of your own making, branchling,” she says lightly, “yet all I am hearing is talk about your kin. What sort of deeds should I expect from you, a sylvari who represents all his people to the Krytan kingdom?”

There has to be something worth sharing, for all the needless politics and convention.

Exhaling, the branchling begins to walk again. “I’m an ambassador of the Pale Tree, yes, as is Dagonet before me.”

 _Spirits,_ she thinks. _How many does one race need?_

“I suppose what you want to know is what, precisely, we do,” he says, “as people who have split ourselves between two cultures so far removed from one another as human and sylvari.” 

“Aye. I do—I would.”

He looks back at her; indeed, looks her dead in the eye, and he grins with a suddenness that could cut: fair and free and undeniably beautiful. “We tell stories,” he tells her, butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-his-mouth, and Jyte laughs until the ravens fly.

——————————————

Lornar’s Pass had once been dwarven domain. It still bears the crumbling reminders of that time, should travelers know which ways to look. 

Caves that were built, not formed, Jyte tells him. Great underground passages that howl with inexplicable wind and plunge into abyssal eternity. Lodgings that were cut into the mountain itself. It was in this way that the dwarves of a bygone age had traversed the unforgiving Shiverpeaks; half beneath the stone, half within it.

Discounting the Priory, however, Niikolais knows few subterranean paths are still in frequent use. Those who now inhabit the pass are a people who prefer the open air to the depths below. Trough the centuries, the mountains themselves have been cleaved by a cold sharper than any mortal blade, making them resemble, to him, an ice-slick maw—between the teeth of which the norn built suspended trestles that now creak beneath his weight. The irreverence it must have taken to do so astounds him.

More than that, he discovers a particular fear of heights such that not even the Pale Tree could have prepared him.

They call it the ‘riven path’, apparently, after the gorge it was built to span. Ravens have flocked to it, made their home here, and they eye him as he moves past.

“Grawl contest this area from time to time.” Walking ahead with far more confidence than he, Jyte gestures to the faded idolatry painted onto the cliff. “We drive them back whenever they get too daring, but they’re persistent apes. Can’t seem to take a warning.”

The wind has the entire span of the gorge to pick up momentum, and by the time it reaches them here, there is enough force behind it that his coattails whipping about his knees feels like taking a lashing. 

Niikolais grasps a rock in his left hand and one of the ropes in his right, waiting for a lull. From what he can see through his hair, the drawings are little more than crude and senseless swaths of colour. The rare coherent shape resembles an ivory skull wreathed in crimson.

“I hope you aren’t saying we may face a fight up here.”

Jyte laughs. It carries back to him a fraction of its original volume. “If we do, it will be a swift battle.”

He risks a glance over the edge and finds himself marvelling at the drop. It certainly would be, one way or the other. “Perhaps then it’s best we simply avoid confrontation altogether.” 

Would he splinter apart into a thousand pieces upon impact, or simply snap in half? Aetherial magic crackles at his nape while he contemplates it, prepared to warp reality around himself and assure it _remains_ mere contemplation.

“Stay near behind me, branchling,” Jyte calls, “and you will have nothing to fear.”

But trepidation locks him at the knees. Jyte produces an immense warmth with the slightest exertion, as all norn do; it seeps through her furs and leathers and helps her soles to grip the ice underfoot. Niikolais, on the other hand, has only the greatly unhelpful skill of keeping his balance while sprinting through jungle moss.

“That’s—Jyte, don’t you dare leave me up here—”

She grins at him as she turns the bend, beckoning him with two fingers. “Whether you stay up here or not is up to you, my friend!”

Protesting weakly, Niikolais narrows his focus to the path ahead instead of the bottom of the gorge he’ll plummet towards should he misstep even once—and every step feels like a misstep when the boards groan no matter how lightly he treads upon them. He is another weight added to already-strained ropes, which in turn hang from beams the norn precariously drove into the outcroppings above.

Hope and audacity. He’s being kept aloft by hope and audacity.

“How long ago did you say this was built?”

“You’re fretting too much,” comes Jyte’s voice, no longer travelling further away. “Consider your environment, not the road you take through it.”

As if to disprove her confidence, a crumbling of snow and stone tumbles from above and lands at his feet. _I would love to,_ he thinks grimly and picks around it, _but it would seem both pose an equal risk._

Jyte waits for him a short ways past the bend. She has hooked a rope in the crook of her elbow and leaned backwards over the edge, narrowed eyes focused far above. His heart nearly stops.

“ _Jyte_?”

“Stay still.”

“Stay still? You straighten up!”

Her mouth curls briefly, a moment spared to shrug off his worry. Then another sheaf of snow cascades down over her and falls through the gaps in the walkway. “Avalanche,” she says, swinging back onto the path in quite a hurry now.

The snow is coming down behind her, too, he notices, and behind him as well. All around, in fact.

“What?”

“Mind the skies!” 

But when Niikolais jerks his chin upwards, there is no sky left to mind, only a roaring of white that shakes the mountain and bellows out over him. His back hits the canyon wall and everything else blots out into muffled darkness.

The next thing he sees is Jyte grinning down at him, her lashes coated in rime, cheeks stung red by the cold she doesn’t feel. Breathing hard, she straightens from her bowed stance, and the weight of the ice and snow she’d borne in his place shakes off from her broad shoulders. 

This shouldn’t have happened, insists the part of his mind that hasn’t lost the ability to think. She would have had to have moved with preternatural speed to reach him. But it’s barely a whisper in the back of his head, the air still echoing the avalanche now seething its way down tot he valley, a hundred feet below, where he’d almost surely have followed if she _hadn’t_ reached him.

She puts a hand to his chin—without asking—and lifts it in what he’s sure is deliberate defiance of the face he makes.

“Nothing’s snapped off, has it, branchling?”

She towers over him so effortlessly. Her palm, when she cups his face, reaches from chin to temple. As she turns it from one side to the other with the same ease as a jotun felling a tree, Niikolais realizes she could wrap him up in her completely, had she the mind to, and he’d be powerless to resist her. The thought makes his knees go weak in the precise way the falling ice hadn’t.

“…No, nothing,” he manages after a shamefully long silence.

Jyte checks him over regardless. “Then you can thank the Spirits for our luck and stop blushing about it,” she says, and he realizes with a jolt of horror that he _is_. “The avalanches here have buried stronger saplings than you, little one! Now, quickly, gather your pride and your wits, if you can, before the sun has fallen low enough to show you herself where they’ve gone.”

He burrows deeper into the collar of her cloak, but there’s nothing he can do about the colour thrumming through him. “It’s the cold,” he lies, for no apparent reason but to give her cause to believe that it very much is _not_ the cold.

But, luckily, she’s already gesturing for him to follow, set on a path only she and her kin dare to determine, much less traverse. “Come, branchling, a full belly and warm hearth wait for us in the valleys beyond the summit.”

With the norn, it seems like everything is beyond another crest, another river that needs fording, another creaking taiga. He aches for home, or at least something like it. A meal and a soft place to sleep are as good as any of that, out here.

“Does one really?”

More and more often, he makes her laugh. Worse still, he’s minding it less and less, barring when it happens suspended above a thousand-foot drop.

“You won’t know unless we make it there, now will you?”

As they near the merciful ending of the riven path, he dares to walk a little quicker, to catch up to her, at which point his voice has taken on an aspen-like shiver. “That’s a clever way of avoiding an answer.”

“It sounds to me like you hardly think it clever at all. Well, maybe you’re right. But it’s also as truthful as anything else I’ve told you.” She stands aside so he can be the first to reunite with solid ground. “It’s a few days out yet, the steading at Venison Pass, but you’ll find a hearth there, sure enough, given that you make the journey there to use it.”

And so Niikolais resigns himself to the passage of time. She leads him through an endless labyrinth of caverns and frozen walkways, finally descending down into the valley, where the snow has begun to thin, and the damp smell of running rivers and springy moss overtakes that of glacier ice.

And though Niikolais does not know it yet, it is the first day of an early autumn that he crosses the divide that invariably separates comfort from adventure and ventures the furthest from home than he has ever been, setting foot for the first time into Jyte’s homeland—into the great and unfortunate Timberline Falls.

——————————————

Once the sun has set, in the Shiverpeaks, there remains precious little time to make camp and stoke a fire before the true cold rushes in. It eats at the bones. But no matter the bitterness, those last few moments of daylight are what unfailingly take Jyte’s breath away. The snow streaks golden red and pink like it has melted away to reveal a sea of riches, and the mountains fade into dusky blue, then purple, and then to starlight.

She makes sure to pitch camp beneath the open stars so long as the weather permits. The branchling resting between her heat and the fire’s, always bundled in her cloak. For a creature made entirely of wood and sap, he shows remarkably little concern for the embers that crack off and spin into the night. Jyte is fascinated by it. And troubled.

Eventually, she has to put the fire from her mind entirely.

She feels as though she’s begun to catch glimpses of a part of him softer than the rest. A place of petals, not merely bark—and at the centre lives his share of the natural curiosity sylvari are said to possess. The Shiverpeaks have done their best to overwhelm him, yet he’s finally warming to that wildness.

She knew he would.

“Do the norn see their own shapes in the stars?”

They speak only briefly throughout the day, but at night, he seems to come alive, gripped by a renewed desire to experience all that surrounds him. Jyte doubts the feeling it gives her will ever stop or grow old.

“We do,” she says. “The humans have their own names for them, but see there? That is Asgeir’s blade.”

“Who was Asgeir?”

For a moment, she forgets who’s she talking to and nearly laughs. Every norn in Tyria knows the tale! The strongest of her people, the founder of Hoelbrak! But—he is not norn. And, she reminds herself, the sylvari are a young race, besides, even if they look grown. No, she should be honoured to share Asgeir’s legend.

“Asgeir was a mighty hero among the norn. With the aid of the Spirits of the Wild, he cut a fang from Jormag’s mouth and led us south in our final hour, when we faced our extinction. It was Asgeir who first taught us that an Elder Dragon can be harmed.”

He is quiet for several moments, then says, curiously, “My people call it Caladbolg. That constellation.”

She doesn’t speak, allowing him to decide whether or not he wishes go on. At last, he does. “It is the thorn the Pale Tree gifted our beloved Riannoc when he took up his calling and left to face Mazdak, the lich.”

The names mean little to her, as Asgeir meant little to him. That doesn’t matter. What matters is the feeling that shapes them, heavy with heroism and loss. Jyte doesn’t know the significance of thorns or callings any more than she does the reason why sylvari one day sprung fully-formed from the seeds of a great tree—but fable is where her people excel.

“Then I will remember its name alongside Asgeir’s,” she says, which is in itself a manner of boastful pride. “Now, I will show you the star-shapes that are unique to the norn. Pay attention, little one! In the coldest months, just as her mortal kin slumber here in Tyria, Bear’s spirit sleeps among the stars. Look—there she is.”

Jyte gestures broadly, proudly. He gives her no answer, but in the edge of her vision, she can see him moving his hand, tracing a shape that does not quite follow Bear’s lines, even though he has the right spot.

She turns her face just so, so she can better watch the attempt.

He gazes into star-flecked eternity with a furrow between his wooden brows, lips apart, preternaturally still in all but in the movement of his hand. As she watches, the grain in his flesh illuminates and fades out again, as of a heart beating through his skin. She knows not whether sylvari truly do have a pulse and lifesblood, but they have proven themselves to be proud bearers of hearts that bleed for the smallest cause.

Jyte grins privately while he won’t see. “No, branchling.” She reaches for his wrist and pulls it higher. “Too low. Come, start from that star, there; ‘tis her head.”

It is going to pain her to return him where he belongs.

The feeling has built up out of snowflakes, out of frost, out of nothing. It’s her own fault, perhaps, for limiting her time with the sylvari to moments of barter and trade. Any one of them might have told her about the stars. Eagerly, she assumes, but only the branchling tells her like _this_ , in a way that she likes, patiently adjusting his hand’s course whenever she says.

“Her paw, here, is part of the constellation my people have named Wynne’s Crown.” Another name whose meaning is like stones on a scale between them; where he bears the weight, she feels no heaviness at all.

Then the sylvari call the bright northern star ‘Dreamlight’, though she knows it as Raven’s Eye, for the way it watches over them throughout the changing of the seasons. Even the greenest hunters learn look for it when they journey to new lands. These differences are strange and amusing and surely can’t be helped. The other races do not hear Raven the way she and her kindred do. They don’t notice Snow Leopard whispering to them on the battlefield, nor her laughter when they outwit their prey. Everyone praises their own instincts, but the norn alone pay their respects to how they came by them.

When she has finished pointing out Wolf’s Teeth and the milky span of Owl’s Mantle, he asks, “Haven’t you also a spirit called Snow Leopard? Where is she?”

“It would seem that she should be up there, wouldn’t it? Of course she is, but she is far too sly for our eyes to see.”

“I see.” Sounding unsure at first, he finally nods, like he’s accepted it.

Jyte pulls her whittling knife from its buckle and resumes the slow work of a new likeness: Ormi the wolf, a once-noble leader to his pack. “We honour her better this way. Her image, we will carve wherever we see fit, but her spirit we leave to freely roam the stars.”

Niikolais sits, luminous eyes watching her hands turn and cut the wood. “And that staff?” he prompts. “Why spend so much time on it when the cold or a skirmish could quickly snap it in two?”

“It’s more than the look of the thing. Besides,” she turns the staff so he can see the resin already running along its grain, “if it breaks, I repair it.”

“I mean, why not sculpt with stone, as Eir Stegalkin does?”

 _Like Eir, huh…_ She huffs a laugh. Eir could attest that even stone can break.

“The medium doesn’t matter, I don’t think. It’s all for the same reason in the end.” The firelight licks over leopard and bear, raven and wolf: the Spirits’ mortal kin made immortal. “Honour and memory, branchling. Honour and memory.”

——————————————

“Go on! Catch it, hurry now!”

Suvi looses like an arrow at the command. Bobcat and cottontail are both gone from her sight in an instant, though the cracking of fallen branches as Suvi makes chase is slower to fade. Stew to sup on tonight, Jyte decides; potatoes, carrots, shallot, and hare.

On the mountaintop, her breath would still hang crystalline around her mouth, but here in southern Timberline, they stray closer to the Steamspur mountains than to the Shiverpeaks, and any further south, Jyte knows the air is hot and the land is green, and swampy, and treacherous. These are the alpine lands, where life and colour has broken through an icy hold. For all her love for the frosty peaks, Jyte’s heart rallies to walk through flowering lupines again. This is the land she belongs to, until the day that a hero takes her people home; this, right here, standing amidst frigid streams and banner trees.

“Your Fort Concordia is not far,” she says to the branchling when he rouses. “Half a day.”

He passes a hand over his fronds, melting away the frost that had settled on them in his sleep. “Well,” he sighs, “I’m glad to know that is our destination, though I’ve yet to discern why.”

His words had bitten harder a week ago, and a fortnight before that, it had been all he could do to make himself look at her. Now she suspects he chides for the sake of chiding, because routine is the foundation of those who carry out their lives up to the neck in politics.

“Are you not an envoy to Divinity’s Reach?” Jyte whistles to Suvi, who comes slinking through the trees a moment later with the buck hanging between her teeth. “Your queen should be grateful to hear what goes on in the Tyria beyond her domain.”

‘Domain’ is the kindest word she can think to use. She has no mind to call it a rule, short-lived and feeble as human reigns tend to be. Insisting they name others to govern them, only to ignore them, or replace them, or kill them—Jyte cannot follow the sense in it. She simply can’t be bothered to try. All that useless pretense for nothing, and the humans still struggle to understand why norn see no use for a king.

They are a race doomed to disappear.

The branchling makes a sound of protest. “I serve as a means of contact and collaboration between the Pale Mother and Queen Jennah. That does not make her _my_ queen.”

Jyte laughs so loudly that a marten darts from the underbrush. “Ha! That is a smart answer,” she says approvingly. “Long ago, when the Great Destroyer stirred in the depths of Tyria, the humans asked the norn lend them their strength to hold back the tides. Now the Krytan queen barely acknowledges us, not even when we stand in her city, among her people.”

She tells it like a bedside tale because she knows norn whose grand-elders had been the children of that age, when the first humans had braved the far Shiverpeaks and stood alongside giants. In the centuries since, her people have watched the rise and fall of the human kingdom. Their entire race has dwindled, reduced to a single thread, and at the top stands the Krytan queen. Their last bastion before they dwindle into memory. What does she know of the Tyria beyond her walled city? What power does she boast? The rest of the world cares little about the preoccupations of a dying people.

Indeed, she doubts the queen possesses little ability to decide for herself the true and right course of action—as she should, if her people walk a razor’s edge. When the time comes, the humans’ razor will be mighty tapered indeed.

“She is so busy fighting her own people over peace treaties and sneak thieves that she cannot see anything that doesn’t already stand at her doorstep,” Jyte says, almost to herself, while the branchling stares at her, unwavering. “Have you never thought so?”

“What I think of the queen’s rule means nothing,” he insists.

“No,” Jyte also insists, “it must mean something. Your eyes and ears do the looking and listening for twice the people mine do. That means something.”

He stares at her all the harder, not answering until she has handed him the waterskin and pointed towards where the river gurgles through broken ice. 

“Is that why you have led me on this wild moa chase through the Shiverpeaks? Because I might pass word of its condition back to the Pale Tree and the queen?”

Jyte narrows her eyes. “Condition?”

“The Sons of Svanir are encroaching on your homesteads and corrupting your people. Icebrood are disrupting your trade routes.” Now he is slow to speak, which means he isn’t blind to the thinness of the ice he’s tread onto.

“These same threats the norn have gladly done battle with for generations! What could the sylvari or human queen do that we already have not tried?” She laughs, nearing unkindness, but only because he could not have interpreted her intent more wrongly. “The Reach already struggles to keep the peace within its own borders. We don’t need anyone’s aid to stand against the Sons, nor shatter Jormag’s minions of ice and snow.” 

Jyte can feel her own tongue slipping, yet she keeps talking anyway, a wolfish smile taking over her features. “But maybe you’re right, and I did this because I wanted you to spread our tale to those who don’t normally hear us. Or maybe I wanted you to come to relish in our way of life, as I do, and stay!”

What’s said is said. She takes a long, defiant swig from the wineskin on her hip.

The branchling—Niikolais—has the grace to look surprised. “What would change, if that were what I chose to do?” he says, at length, in the tone of one picking his words carefully.

She sees no reason to read too deeply into it. Sylvari speak prettily, as though they’ve learned the secret to weaving flowers into their speech and can’t get enough of doing so, but they are far more straightforward than humans are. 

“What makes you think that would make me any different? The me you see right now is the me I will always be, whether in a fortnight or a hundred days from today.”

“But what _would_ change? If we weren’t journeying to Concordia? Surely something would change, even if—”

“Nothing would change,” she repeats, beginning the quick work of lashing the bedrolls together. “I would show you how to hunt larger prey, maybe. How to ice-fish. To recognize the Spirits of the Wild in the wind and the snow.”

Within moments, they are fully-packed, but she remains squatting and brings a thumb to her mouth. “Have you ever been to an alemoot?” She hears herself ask. “We hold them to celebrate our accomplishments with food and drink, and contests of skill, and the retelling of our heroes’ tales. I’d like to see you try and drink Bjorn the Heavy-Handed under the table. If you could get one of those illusions of yours to do the drinking for you...”

Spirits help her. Somehow, she’s started to think about it and talk about it in terms of possibility. She waves him off, shaking her head to clear it. “Go on, now. Fill that waterskin before we begin this final leg.”

Whatever Niikolais had meant to say, he thinks better of, and he goes to crouch at the river’s mouth, leaving Jyte to stare a hole into the rock, somewhere else, chewing her thumb.

⸙⸙⸙

She can tell as soon as they reach the first crest that something has gone wrong.

It comes to her on the air. Sap, copper, mildew. 

At the next crest, they see it.

The haven has become a mass of writhing thorns and slime. There are no guards stationed atop the ramparts, nor at the open gates. It’s an impossible task to take it all in at first, because what she had believed to be forever stalwart and true keeps flashing over top, as though it will be there still if she only pictures it hard enough. Jyte’s heart swells in her chest until it feels, beyond all reason, too big for it.

“Wurm’s blood.”

She adopts a quick, loping towards the haven, realizing it only when Suvi darts ahead to scout for her. There are no voices. Cold silence where once was the ceaseless clang of armour and weapons under repair—cold silence, and nothing more.

At the river’s edge, Jyte stops. The branchling’s graceful footsteps hasten through the scrub grass behind her, a sound she delegates to the very back of her head, because Concordia stands broken.

Its gates hang open, the boards wrenched apart and strewn about, and the waypoint hangs still, hangs dull, choked by vines.

The branchling falls in beside her, perfectly still at her elbow. “When last did you pass by the Gyre Rapids, Jyte?” he asks, strangely remote.

“Not but a month ago.” Jyte, too, hears herself speak from leagues away. “I pursued a hunt from Bynebrachen into Stromkarl, to the east.”

Again, she moves forward, crossing the threshold with sylvari and Suvi on her heels. The very air inside feels different. Cursed. She gazes at the tents hanging in shreds from their posts like ribbons, the ruptured ground through which the dusty red vines must have sprouted. A great spike drives through the central camp and spirals upwards by a dozen yards or more.

And all as quiet as the grave.

Her skin crawls, the whispers of the dead brushing across it.

“Oh,” says Niikolais.

She reaches into her quiver and hooks an arrow between her knuckles. “Who goes there?”

“No one,” he says, then, “Nothing.” He finally amends with, “A corpse,” and gestures for her to look.

Jyte moves to stand beneath the knot in the vine, hanging about ten hand’s span above her head. She can’t fault Niikolais for taking a moment to notice anything further remiss, because even the body has been so thoroughly strangled that even she can barely make out the tiny, lifeless limbs which protrude from the mass.

Asura, she figures; there had been no children kept in the camp. The limbs themselves are, strangely, unarmored, and after a moment, she spots a twisted greave among the rubble. As though the vines themselves had rent the plate apart so they could get at the meat beneath. Frowning, Jyte reaches up and takes a limp ankle in hand.

“What?”

“Hm.”

“What is it? Did you find something?” 

She gets the feeling he would stand on tiptoe if it weren’t so undignified. Without looking, she cuffs him by the back of the collar and hefts him to sit upon her shoulder. “Hush,” she says as he erupts in protest. “Now you can see better than me. Look.”

Sylvari would have to be special indeed to boast sharper eyes than a norn, but she means only to placate, which it does. He sniffs and settles like a floral raven upon his perch, one willowy hand grasping her far shoulder to keep his balance.

“Their flesh has been scored in one direction.”

The body is riddled with gouges wherever it isn’t obscured or protected. Shallow at first, but the higher Jyte tracks up the body, the deeper they get, decaying flesh bunched around the thorns like a furrow in the soil. Someone had tried to pull the asura down, and had pulled them further onto the thorns instead. 

“There may have been survivors,” he says.

She searches the tendrils for other cocoons. Finds two, each near to the walls. Nodding, she points them out. “There aren’t enough bodies. There were certainly survivors.”

The branchling, however, has gone still. She looks up and sees him still focused upwards, too. “Jyte… does it seem to you that these vines are breathing?”

Many sylvari will say something like that and not mean it in a straightforward way. Jyte doesn’t believe he knows how to be coy, despite his inclinations. So she watches, unwavering, until she’s fairly sure she’s spotted the tendrils swaying, just a little, far above. But maybe she’s just seeing what he’s told her to see. That is the way of mesmers. She squats, slanting her shoulder for him to slip down from.

“Down you get. Let’s see.”

He straightens his collar, eyes upward as she strides forward. The vine does not shift even when she puts power into her shoulder and shoves it.

“Do you still see something, branchling?”

“Yes.”

“Hm,” says Jyte, and draws her shortbow. 

She aims for the gnarled tendril hanging above the haven like a beacon, releases her breath, and looses the shot. The arrow soars to its peak and cuts into the vine with a wooden _thock_.

Quiet oozes outward.

Niikolais places a terse hand to his blade.

“Wait,” she breathes. “There’s something.”

“I can feel it,” he murmurs back.

Jyte would ask him what he means by that, but when she opens her mouth, something else begins to groan; an eldritch sound with such a deepness of pitch that she, too, feels it more than she hears it. At her side, silently crept up without her calling, Suvi begins to growl. 

The vine above recoils with the lumberous slowness of a creature shifting in its sleep, and this time she’s sure of it—it isn’t a trick of her eyes or the wind. They watch it twist and then coil around the arrow as though it’d gladly rip it out if it had the finesse to do so.

The vines do move. They do breathe. And if they breathe, then they _think_.

“Branchling,” she murmurs, dropping her hand to Suvi’s bristling ruff, “I think it’s time we return you home.”

At the same time, Niikolais, who stands beside her looking pale and grim, says in a voice so distant, so dry that it sounds like wildfire, “There’s something I have to tend to.”

——————————————

_The sun is too far gone, and a blizzard is due tonight._ That is the argument Jyte gives him against departing for the Grove. 

_I have a friend who makes her hunting grounds near these parts,_ she’d said. _She will provide us lodgings for the night, then I will take you to an asuran waypoint come daybreak. Besides, you don’t have the coin to travel from here. We need to move north._

He had all but blistered with frustration. The vines have wrapped him in the same unyielding grip as the asura corpse, and Niikolais knows the stinging won’t ease until he’s in the shade of the Pale Mother’s roots once more. Even then, he will know relief only once he has relayed all his knowledge to her—and perhaps even to the Wardens.

But Jyte has given him little recourse. 

Well. That isn’t exactly true. 

If he told her, “I’m leaving, and you cannot stop me. We passed a waypoint coming down the slopes; I can just as easily walk back up to it again,” then he doubts she would force him to stay. She has led him across what feels like nearly the entire Shiverpeaks, but she hasn’t had to _force_ him to stay on this journey past the first few days of resistance he’d put up. Either way, she’s right about the cost. 

_Maybe I wanted you to come to relish in our way of life, like I do, and stay!_

He lets the words float over him like petals on a stream.

“Who is your friend?” he asks while they walk, because petals on a stream aren’t enough to unmake the brewing storm that plucks them from the tree in the first place.

“Kelda Hallesdottir.” Jyte keeps her eyes trained forwards, lips thin. “She is a skilled hunter and tracker. Together, she and I built a lodge in the mountains for norn travelling to and from the Pass: Glacierhalles Steading.”

They trek above on in silence, and as she’d warned, roiling indigo-grey clouds chase them across the sky and blot out the sun. He notices the first flecks of falling snow once they’re above the treeline, followed by a cold northern wind that whistles through unimpeded.

“The cloak, branchling,” Jyte says once this begins, dropping it over his shoulders sooner than he can argue. Wordlessly, he nods his thanks and gathers the pelt close about his neck and mouth. “Jotun make use of this route, as well. Beware of falling stones!”

She hastens her step and takes point, shouldering the chill in little more than tanned leather and dolyak’s fur. Suvi pads along near to his left, disappearing and reappearing in the worsening squall like a watchful mountain spirit.

Before long, he can barely see either norn or wildcat. The snow deepens around his ankles, then his calves, and he wonders, treacherously, resentfully, whether they’re even following a path any longer, or if Jyte has led them astray to satisfy her desire to keep him, after all. He fumbles to light a torch.

“Jyte!” he calls, the wind snatching it away as though hungry for his voice. “Don’t you dare leave me!”

No answer comes. Niikolais curses and quickens his pace in pursuit of figures he can no longer see nor hear, feeling the frost on the ridges of his face melt and refreeze seconds apart. “Suvi!” he tries, to the same result. “Brambles. Shoots and thorns!”

There’s no use in panicking, he tells himself. Level heads will prevail, he tells himself. She and Kelda had built the lodge atop the mountain pass, Jyte had said. All he can do is continue to climb and hope, but even that is guesswork, the flurry reducing what he can see to whatever sprouts in front of his nose. If he stumbles and loses track of up and down, he will be utterly lost until the storm passes.

He extends a wary hand, and finding no obstructions, he pushes on—and though he strains to hear, the only sound is the wind howling through the pass like the ghosts of Ascalon. At length, he thinks he might have rediscovered Jyte’s path, judging by the furrows in the snow. If it _does_ belong to her, he thinks, grimly following it anyway. 

Niikolais walks the tracks for so long that he begins to clench his jaw again. It isn’t that the cold will kill him, not even Shiverpeaks cold, so much as the helplessness that breathes down his neck the further he goes without something to break the tumbling, endless white. He knows that the wind had come from the north, so he keeps it to his right, biting into his cheek at the same angle as when it’d first stirred up.

Finally, desperation settles an arm around his shoulders like an old adversary trying to get in a good gibe. Niikolais reaches into the weave of the universe and conjures a mimicry of himself, and then a second, each carrying their own torch. “Go,” he tells them breathlessly, “on my left and right.” 

They provide enough light among them that he can make out the footprints proper. Norn in size, flanked on and off by a single channel that would fit Suvi’s size.

And distantly ahead is a light. Torchlight.

“Please, Mother,” he whispers, hastening towards it.

He finds a swaying tin and horn lantern hung from a single post, the flame inside guarded from the wind by beveled glass. From here, another distant light flickers at him through the snow. The amount of foot traffic along the Lion’s Road detour would have made this an impossible task, but here, the prints are still clearly defined, though quickly blowing over. They lead directly to—or from—the next guidepost, so Niikolais forces his stiffening limbs to move and follows. The wolf-pelt drags on the ground and weighs him down from behind.

Then a shriek pierces the deafening gale, sharp enough that it lances a chill up his spine and into his stomach. His concentration falters, and his clones’ presence in reality shatters. The birdlike cry either continues on or echoes all around him, bouncing off the cliffs. Niikolais snaps a hand to draw his blade, but before he can, a hand encircles his arm, and as it pulls him around, he finds himself confronted, wide-eyed, by Jyte’s snow-bitten face.

Relief and indignation flood him simultaneously. “You left me behind,” he accuses the moment he has breath for it. “You told me to take care and then you lost me.”

Her already troubled expression worsens.

“Put that out,” she says of his torch, then sweeps him into her arms without waiting. 

“I can,” _walk_ , he means to say, out of protest and pride, but as soon as he’s up, his legs turn to seaweed. 

She snuffs the torch in the snowdrifts and sets out for the lodge, swaddling him in her snow-clung cloak without another word. Niikolais relents to rest his head on her shoulder, feeling it rise and fall with her gait. “You left me,” he says again. “How long did you walk for before you thought to look back? I’m not a norn, I can’t scale a mountain just because I will it.”

Jyte takes a long time to answer. “I didn’t know,” she says at last in a terribly quiet voice. “I forgot how different things are between us. Your little legs—no. I let my focus wander. Concordia, the jotun, tomorrow… I forgot.”

He watches in profile the animal way she grits her teeth. 

“You’ve matched me until now.”

Niikolais has no reply for that.

Nothing more passes between them while Jyte carries him the rest of the way to Glacierhalles Steading. It isn’t far. He’d almost made it himself. Surely he would have made it—just not as quickly, of course. The lodge’s eaves are ablaze with lit lanterns. In the open doorway, a raven-haired norn stands vigil, her arms and ankles crossed. 

“Raven led you to him, did he?” She stands aside. 

Jyte sets him down inside, shaking her head. “I asked him to lend me his eyes,” she says, utterly lacking in zeal, “but Raven was already elsewhere. He led the branchling safely here.”

⸙⸙⸙

Kelda is a stern-looking norn with a heavy brow and scarred cheek. “Got it fighting an ice troll,” she says proudly, when she notices his staring. “What about you? Any scars under all that bark?”

“No, and our wounds rarely disfigure us,” he replies, looking to Jyte for aid. Her attention on him is fleeting, subdued in a way he’s never before seen. “Have you had the chance to inform Kelda why we’re here?”

The norn woman nods. “Taking shelter from the storm before you travel north. You barely made it in time.”

What would she consider ‘arriving late’ to be?

Jyte sets her gloves and jerkin to dry, then crosses the room and relieves him of the sodden wolf pelt, finally hanging it by the fire, too. Kelda had not been wearing any furs and so hangs nothing. 

“Don’t you go fretting that we’ve disrupted something, branchling,” Jyte murmurs. “This isn’t the first time midnight refuge has been taken here.” The other woman keeps nodding, leaning against the doorframe. “Besides, Kelda and I built this lodge together, so that makes it equally mine and hers.”

“She says that,” Kelda says, “but she spends so much of her time up in the mountains that it’s more of an infrequent camping ground.” 

“I remember where you keep the good ale. Isn’t that enough?”

Kelda laughs abruptly and waves her off. “Go on and get it, then.”

While Jyte finds and taps the keg in the corner, the older norn woman draws a third chair to the table before the hearth. She gestures towards it, and her sullen brow is more than enough to encourage Niikolais to sit before she asks aloud, though he has to hop to reach the seat.

“Now… What’s so important up north that you two tried outrunning a blizzard you knew was coming?” She’s shrewd, like Jyte.

Niikolais breathes deep through a new wave of forbidding restlessness.

“We had been travelling Lornar’s Pass and headed south towards Fort Concordia so I could meet with the scholars working in that area.” As he speaks, Kelda’s expression gradually starts blackening, well beyond its default state, and it fills him with a strange, weightless unease. With increasing uncertainty, he goes on, “However, when we arrived, we found that the entire location has been destroyed by vines.”

Jyte returns with three overflowing steins that she sets on the table between them. “The very air there is choked.”

“Aye…” Kelda drawls, nodding her thanks to Jyte, and the unsurprised way she says this confirms the fears the look on her face had set loose in him. “I came across that sight not too long ago, myself.”

Niikolais opts to press the subject. “May I ask how recently that was?” 

“A few days, a week…” She waves her hand. “My hunting grounds span from here to Pythian Point. I have passed Concordia many times since it was overrun.”

The trial he’d had to undergo to _reach_ the lodge still buzzes at the back of Niikolais’ head like a bumblebee caught in his fronds. Soft, ultimately harmless, but a worry and a growing irritation the longer it’s left unaddressed. He finds himself terse. “But what about the first time you laid eyes on it, after the attack?”

Kelda’s almond-shaped eyes narrow in thought. “Closer to a week. No, more than that. The Vigil and Priory were still in the process of relocating the survivors.”

“Did you not offer them any aid?” Despite his better instincts, he cannot keep the disapproval from his voice.

“Why would I have done?” asks Kelda, stony-faced. “Those orders, they have their own plans figured out for when they must surrender a post. A passing hunter cannot help with that. I was pursuing my own prey.”

Niikolais purses his cleft lips and turns his gaze from the dispassionate women before him. No, he realizes; he still doesn’t understand this side to the norn. How could anyone follow their own pursuits while others are not only in need, but well within reach?

With a preternatural sense of timing, Jyte speaks up, staring into her drink while she swirls it. “Don’t mistake it for selfishness, branchling.”

“You’ve mentioned before the abundance of quarry there is to hunt here,” Niikolais says to the fire, timbre intentionally—perhaps incisively—lofty, testing the boundaries of what he can get away with. “If you could help the victims of a tragedy, it seems like so small a sacrifice to let one of many more beasts run free in exchange.”

Jyte is seemingly inescapably trapped by her mug’s contents. “We have a saying for this. ‘Unless she first feeds herself, a hunter cannot—’”

“Ahh, never mind proverbs, Jyte.” Stretching her arms towards the ancient oaken beams above, Kelda sighs, signalling the end to this line of thought. “Sylvari are too full of nobility and not enough selfishness. Even Owl’s spectral wings cannot bring us to see eye-to-eye in a single night.”

A quick glance reveals Jyte’s swift frown. It washes away the instant she notices him looking. Snapping her fingers at her side, she beckons Suvi to her, where the wildcat settles reluctantly, preferring to patrol the room.

“For now, drink.” Kelda nudges a stein towards him. It’s easily thrice as large as any he’s used before. “And tell me what you saw.”

“What we saw was vines and death.”

“They were aware, Kelda.”

Kelda archly raises a brow, but before she can speak, an explanation comes pouring helplessly from his lips. “I fear that they might belong to the dragon.”

Both norn turn their fierce gazes on him. “Dragon?” they ask in unison. “What in Jormag’s name are you talking about?” asks Kelda. Then Jyte, at last straightening in her seat—“Another dragon?”

His stomach clenches. An urge comes over him to reach for the drink like Kelda had suggested he do, after all; an urge which he obeys. He has to hold the tankard in both hands just to lift it.

Like Jyte, he, too, loses himself in the amber liquid that tastes nothing like the sweet nectars and honeyed mead he knows, murmuring, “Mordremoth, the jungle dragon. The Priory believes it resides in the heart of the Maguuma jungle, far to the west of Rata Sum.” But not far enough. “It seems Scarlet Briar awoke its consciousness when her drill released the ley energy beneath Lion’s Arch.”

“A sylvari woke up another elder dragon.” Kelda sounds almost impressed. “I’ll be damned.”

Niikolais laughs without humour, the sound weak on his lips. “Yes, well, I’m afraid she may have felt its lure long before the Breachmaker was so much as a concept in her broken mind.”

The things he has been made privy to since the secondborn had run amok in Divinity’s Reach still turn his stomach.

“Huh,” says Kelda. “I suppose that’s why you look as though you were left out in a killing frost. So what, exactly, calls your attention north instead of west?”

“My home. I must return to the Pale Tree and confer with her about what I saw. And my duties in Kryta have gone neglected for… too long.”

“Your duties?” Kelda glances to Jyte, perhaps hoping she will clarify with more familiar terms, but again, Jyte’s attention is fleeting and spectral. She barely meets Kelda’s eyes, and she does not speak when she does.

“I can feel the Tree’s voice urging me back to her.” It gets all the worse when he acknowledges it. “If another dragon is to stage an assault on Tyria, it is our duty as her children to protect her roots from whatever may come.”

The room falls silent, for a time. Then Kelda lifts her ale and drinks deep.

“You little ones _are_ too somber! Fight well and celebrate! Life can end too swiftly to waste the time you have on remorse and obligation.”

Jyte laughs, doing the same. “Now that I can raise a mug to.”

She pushes her chair back as suddenly as she’d spoke and collects their mugs to refill them. Again, Kelda nudges the third towards him, which had barely been sipped from in the first place.

When Jyte sits again, she brings with her an entirely new topic, one that appears to be meant for Kelda alone. “Lauga asked for salted meats. At Junction Haven, you remember her… Seems like the dredge are really pushing their territory, out of the blue. Could be related.”

“Could just as easily be brazen balls and drill-blasted brains. Is she willing to pay?”

“Double,” Jyte murmurs into her drink.

The two engross themselves in conversation like this until well after nightfall. Apparently, the norn’s famous independence doesn’t preclude a love for fellowship (or, at least, someone like-minded to brag to). 

Some are boastful tales, as he’d expected, and before long, Jyte is recounting a hunt she’d pursued for ten days through a blizzard. Then Kelda mentions how she’d slayed half a dozen Sons of Svanir who had dared to approach the homestead, so Jyte brings up that she’d brawled bare-fisted at the last alemoot and won three against one. 

But there are other stories, too, and they are stark in their sobriety.

Niikolais excuses himself when their tones take a turn for it, hoping that manners will save him from the steadily-increasing sense he has of being suffocated. 

Voices he has only ever heard booming with laughter and challenge now become reverent. Their timbre shivers through his petals. They move from the table and sit and drink around the fire, throwing their massive flickering shadows across the room.

Despite his gripping need to give them privacy, he cannot help but overhear their murmuring; such is the manner of norn voices and norn homesteads, where the only walls they bothered to build are the ones which keep out the snow.

It’s like this that he learns why Kelda had slain the Svanir she did. They had come looking to take her brother, and though he had held the steading fast, by the end, they had tired of his defiance and chose to take his life in lieu of his freedom. 

In retaliation, Kelda became the bear, felled all who had touched him, and dragged their bodies the long trek back to Hoelbrak. Now she boasts of it to keep her brother’s spirit alive.

Neither she nor Jyte weep, as a sylvari might. They venerate him. They drink.

Niikolais listens in silence. He can feel his frown wanting to deepen, though he does his best to appear more jovial, lest Kelda ply him with more drink, all of which has been increasingly swarthy norn brews that hit hard and keep hitting until morning.

At last, Kelda stands and lumbers to the windows, saying in an offhand way, “There is an asuran caravan heading to Lion’s Arch come the dawning. I have poultices and wool to trade for Krytan ale, so I’ve agreed to escort them at least as far as Gendarran.” She braces her hand on the doorframe and squints outside with a frown. “They’ll be passing through my hunting grounds, anyway. Good opportunity to get Lauga her salted meats.”

“Save me a keg, won’t you,” Jyte calls from where she sits sprawled by the hearth.

“Only if you finish your business with your little sylvari first. You’re always trying to do ten things at once and end up doing none.”

Niikolais glances sharply in Jyte’s direction at that, only to find her already looking back, electrum eyes reflecting the firelight with an almost animal quality. Unsmiling, gazing at him, nearly gazing _through_ him. 

She runs her thumb thoughtfully back and forth along the rim of her flagon for a long few moments, then glances towards Kelda’s turned back and scoffs. Loudly. “I bested you in the Big Brawl that one year, didn’t I?”

“I’ll best you in a big brawl right now if you don’t get up and help me saddle the dolyak, fledgling.”

To that peculiar nickname, Jyte scoffs again, but levers herself to her feet. Standing remarkably steady for a woman whose flagon had been close at hand—and rarely empty—all evening, she dons her wolfen cloak and joins Kelda outside. 

The worst of the blizzard must have either passed or reached a temporary lull, because their silhouettes are visible through the window, dimly lit by the braziers in the eaves. Either the cold has sobered them up some, or a norn’s drink isn’t so strong that it would interfere with a norn’s livelihood, for they set quickly to work.

Niikolais pulls a chair and settles with his chin in the divot of his folded arms, watching the two women fit a penned dolyak with a bridle and saddlebags. Before long, Jyte claps Kelda across the back, and the older norn tugs on the reins and departs over the crest with the dolyak in tow.

Jyte then vanishes, too, and shortly he hears her at the wood block.

The Shiverpeaks are an uncontrollable place, he decides. A rule for one does not make a rule for all, no matter how sensible that might be. His earlier frustration returns tenfold and churns in his stomach. 

It isn’t even that he wants to leave anymore—not the way he had wanted to leave those first few hours after the Priory—but what reason dictates he must stay the night at the lodge, if norn do not fear being caught in a blizzard in the first place?

When Jyte finally returns, her cheeks have lost their rosy tipsy-glow, and her arms are piled high with firewood. She stacks it by the fireside, then returns to the great double doors and lowers the drop bar into place.

“There,” she says. “That should be enough to keep even a willow tree warm.”

Niikolais has no intention of letting her herd him into complacency. “If I am to wait until morning to return to the Grove, on account of the weather, I cannot understand why Kelda would see it fit to depart tonight.”

“You little ones are too somber,” she sighs. “These roads are dangerous for traders to walk alone. So long as Kelda guards the path, it will be safe from ambush throughout the night. She has the strength of a dozen Svanir!”

Clearly she’s trying to ease his concerns, but it feels closer to a dismissal. He isn’t even sure she understands where his issues with Kelda’s departure truly lay. “Her lack of strength is not what I fear for.”

“Then you should fear for nothing!” she replies sharply. “These untamed lands have already tested her tenfold. Any foes who come across her tonight should beseech the Spirits be with them.”

Drunk, bereaved, travelling by night in a tumultuous storm—if all norn are so brazen, he will never find peace in these mountains.

“It seems you’re content to do little else but drink and boast of the foes you’ve slain and the contests you’ve won!” Niikolais despairs. Feeling it grip him and shake him like a physical thing, he drops his face into his hands. “And if not that, then to chase glory until you claim it, or death claims you. Whichever one should happen first.”

Jyte just looks at him. Standing tall, unshaken as ever was and seemingly ever will be, at least until the day the Shiverpeaks are brought down by the very deepest stone. She strips away her gloves and her coat and shakes the snow from them.

“Ale-goggles sharpen our vision!” she says. “And ale-fists hit hard.”

He sees her glance his way as she turns to the fireplace, the keenness of a raven’s eyes looking for something no man has ever been interested in. They hardly match the tone of what she says, gloating he’d sooner hear at the alemoots she told him about, where at least anyone saying so would be drunk.

Feels like there’s stinging nettle in his throat.

Some barbs catch onto his voice. “That’s presuming they hit anything at all.”

He knows a few sylvari who would draw blood for a comment like that. Niikolais takes care to whet his tongue as well as his blade for that very reason. But, after a pause, Jyte brushes it off with the same indifference as though it were real stinging nettle that had come forth and pricked her: with a scoff, slapping a great palm against her outer thigh, as if to say, ‘ _That’s_ how little this troubles me.’

“Even sylvari die,” she says, musingly. “Branchling, if you could say it and have it be so, how would you have us conquer that final, endless plain? How better a way could there be, than to refuse to fear it, so it can never lead us into despair? Whatever else lies beyond this life, through our glory, we live on in Tyria forever.”

Frustrated, he pushes his fingers into his fronds. A few petals shake loose onto the table, which seems to be how things go these days. “You’ve said, you’ve told me, but to be so glad to die!”

Jyte corrects him without looking up from the kindling. “ _Unafraid_ to die.”

He chances a glance at her through the cage of his folded arms. Her back is to him, the hair at her nape damp and steaming. Where her shirt touches the skin, in this light, and at this angle, he can make out the shape of the tattoo etched down her back.

“You’re always speaking as though you know no fear at all.” Perhaps this is a box he should not open, but his fingers are already lifting the lid. “Everything fears something, Jyte, even animals. Even the Elder Dragons.”

Even boastful norn.

And indeed, Jyte has gone somewhere remote, one hand atop the log pile. When motion resumes—and it eventually does—it lacks the easy sway of before. She squats and sparks a flint, encouraging an ember to grow among the kindling like she has every night he has known her.

“It isn’t that we fear nothing,” he finally hears her say, with a nakedness he hadn’t thought her capable of. “Only that death is not among the things we do.”

Niikolais makes a weak noise of displeasure. “I’ve had to blindly wander after you once already today. Tell me clearly or accept that I will never understand your reasons, I beg you.”

The firewood clangs tonelessly as she adds it to the hearth.

“Being forgotten.” Now she is toneless, and that is worse than naked. “We fear a second death whereupon our names are no longer spoken aloud or remembered, and our deeds are lost to time. Our frozen cairns indistinguishable and unremarked upon. If I have done nothing worthy of song, then who will sing about me?”

In the silence after Jyte says this, something deep inside his chest begins to sting like a hidden sprout that has grown unchecked and bloomed into a thistle. This time the nettle scratches his insides instead of flying at Jyte’s face. 

He presses his fingers to his temples until she looks to him, a stern bent to her jaw. Waiting for his reply. Because of course she must assume he has one, given that he pressed her so hard to let him get here. But if he had, that had been before he’d heard her voice. Now he just feels lost.

“We pursue legends of our own,” he finally says on an exhale, “if you wish to call them that.” 

She tilts her head to the side, a tacit request to continue, and Niikolais is quick to comply. “Some sylvari are destined for a larger purpose, a noble calling we cannot ignore. It is a burden, an ache that sings to us to fulfill it.”

“You have mentioned a calling before. They were given a thorn. Caladbolg.”

He takes a breath to answer and finds himself needing to hold it behind a wistfully sad smile he hadn’t expected. She remembered. She’d said she would. 

“Yes. As with Riannoc, those who take up the mantle and become Valiant—whenever in their life that may be—shall be unable to rest until they have achieved the task set before them. Many have gladly died pursuing that call.”

Some he had met in life. Others, he simply _knows_ , as the Dream knows all sylvari. There but gone, ripples on the lake of his people’s grief. Waine’s betrayal still lingers over them like a funerary shroud, so near to the surface that sometimes Niikolais wonders how many lifetimes must pass before new bark covers the wound. 

Perhaps they are all of them still too young.

“Wyld Hunts are a monumental endeavour.” He wants her to understand this. “They consume our lives, if they are not of themselves impossible, and often sooner to see to their champions’ ends than the other way around.”

The fire crackles and spits, punctuating his words with a note of finality. Jyte remains crouching. She rearranges the logs with a poker that would be a spear to anyone but a norn. 

“When that happens, the Valiant’s memories return to the Dream to inspire us of their valour and bravery, but the loss resounds within us all, no matter how grand a tale we could make of their passing. That… that is our call.”

“Hm,” Jyte says, chewing her thumb. She stares into the flame, poker laid across parted knees, an expression of deep and troubled thought on her face.

Then she rises, strangely tangible now that she’s shed the leathers, furs, and tracker’s stance that have until now seemed to elevate her above. She swings the chimney crane and kettle over the fire. After a moment’s contemplation, she also brings a wineskin from the mantel and hangs it to warm.

“Have you one of these callings?” she asks, inscrutably.

He thinks, _It is an itch that cannot be scratched by anything other than its own fulfillment._ And he itches—he always itches, but nothing has told him yet where to put his hand.

Sometimes it feels like that will drive him beyond his own mind.

“…I don’t know.”

“Do you want one?”

For the second time, he has no ready answer. _I would need nothing more,_ he should say, would like to say, but in the back of his heart he can feel the emptiness where Valthika should be, had he not chosen a soundless life. Sometimes, Niikolais wonders if he, too, wouldn’t rather the silence than to constantly bear this uncertain weight. 

But only sometimes.

“Branchling?”

Gripped by a desperation, a need to say something that satisfies her for once, he draws the only truth he knows from the furthest reaches of his mind, and he lays it down upon the table. “I would be honoured to have the Dream guide my heart, and the call, my hand.” 

“Why so?”

“Because—” He falters, tries again. “Because there is so much to do in this life that on my own, I find myself wanting to touch the stars.” 

Jyte turns a new look sharply on him, and a second leaf unfurls inside his soul, this one verdant and smooth, setting his veins delightfully alight with the thrill of empathy and of understanding _why_ , at long last. “Oh.”

She brings her knuckles to her mouth and keeps them there for a moment, elbow braced on a leather-clad thigh. He doesn’t have to see behind them to know that she hides a smile.

“Then which part distresses you, branchling?” she asks, while Niikolais’ lips tremble. “We agree that it is a comfort to have a cause you’re willing to die for. For you, your dream may point the way, but the norn must stake out their own causes and make their own ends.”

He releases a breath. The nettle in his throat at last goes to seed, soon to settle in his stomach. “Yes, I… I believe I understand that now.”

“It looks to me that our goals are more alike than you thought.”

“With enough twisting,” he tries, purely for the sake of giving the argument fair play, “any two things could be made to sound alike.”

“Am I twisting, branchling? Through the great deeds we leave in our wake, our spirit remains connected to our people—even from beyond the grave. If you ask me, that is not too unlike your dream.”

Niikolais exhales softly. “No.” No, it isn’t.

“When your heroes die,” Jyte begins, in an easy, slow tempo, as though she’s putting her thoughts together only moments before speaking them aloud, “their memories go back to this ‘dream’, and when norn die, we return to the Shiverpeaks to rest forever in her arms. There, my people will bring our legacies back to life by fire and moonlight.”

“Your skaalds,” he murmurs.

“Our skaalds. That’s why, so long as we live, we gladly do battle against our enemies that would hasten us to our end. We will never be overcome and will never give up. Not on legend, hearth, or our companions.”

This time her sidelong look is a wolfish grin. “That includes you, branchling.”

Frowning, Niikolais turns his face away. “Don’t be like that,” he says, grateful for the opportunity to go back to prickling at the things she says. “I may be here now, but that doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten how you plucked me up and strung me along through the mountains on little more but a whim.”

The poker clangs as Jyte sets it back on its hook and rises to her full height. She comes to the table and leans against it, dark-lashed eyes cast down towards him. Her sheer size overwhelms even a room built to accommodate many norn.

“Long memories don’t hold a candle to the skaalds. You’re here now. And here!” She passes a hand between them, then skims it a hair’s breadth from touching across his shoulders and crown, and finally, she brings it beneath his jaw and tugs it so he’s no recourse but to look at her again. “Looks to me like there are no strings left.”

Her lips curl in a slight smile.

He does his best to hold himself stern, with his shoulders back and his chin up, because from anyone else, this would be a challenge he’d have to rise to. He’d put his blade or a sharp retort to the test. 

But Jyte’s eyes are their own apologetic touch as they rove every inch of his face, and Niikolais tugs her hand away and grips it between his for a moment, feeling a shiver trickle down his spine.

“None that you can see,” he says softly.

——————————————

The fire does not last the night.

Niikolais has watched it gutter and spit and finally collapse into a bed of coals, hazily warm, unwilling to die. All other light has long since gone out, save for the moon on the snow and his own gentle glow, which reflects off Suvi’s eyes together with the embers whenever she rouses and finds him also awake.

The lynx lays folded in the window and is nearly invisible against the climbing snowdrifts outside. Beside him, Jyte sleeps easy, the knuckles of one hand caught between his fronds and stretched doeskin sheets.

Her low bed rests against the back wall between the corner and the hearth. All the lodges she’s taken him to have been like this; he supposes it leaves the common area open for drinking and rambunctious--sometimes aggressive--company. For norn who do their coming and going by the amount of snow that blocks the pass, it is a practical arrangement; Niikolais, however, feels like he lies in a sepulchre of heat and pelts.

Jyte had pulled them about her waist and gone to sleep. He knows she does this soundly only on the nights that Suvi sits watch, as she does now, but this time, he cannot draw the same reassurance from their ease.

His heart has been taken by thorns.

He’d likened this feeling to stinging nettle in his throat. He’d thought it had eased when Jyte finally phrased her unflinching, unapologetic parables in a way he could understand—but it has come back in the hours since Kelda left for the Lion Road, and now he’s sure it’s too persistent, too malaised, to have come from butting heads with nornish philosophy.

There’s no distinction to the ache in his chest whether he considers the treacherous climb to Glacierhalles steading, or Jyte’s brittle confession, or how immense the chaos must have been the day Concordia was rent by vines. The ache just squeezes, like a living thing that is and isn’t a part of him.

Niikolais finally rises onto an elbow and meets Suvi’s eye. “Watch the path,” he tells her, but she continues to watch him. Unblinking. Unmoving. Unperturbed.

Once or twice, when he was a sapling, he saw sylvari the wardens had rescued from the Nightmare Court. They would weep to the menders and speak about a dark and twisted vine. They said that where the Mother’s tender boughs had always been a stalwart shelter, they had felt brambles begin to creep in and overtake.

He lays a hand across his chest. There is no pulse, for he lacks the beating heart to pump the sap that fills his veins, that it would then keep time with the glow that ebbs and flows between each gap in his bark. He has no pulse, yet he is nonetheless vibrantly alive. His love for the Pale Tree burns in him eternal, and he feels no temptation to pervert her.

So, then _what_ —?

Mindful of Jyte’s slumbering, he keeps his voice to a whisper, as he brushes the back of his wrist across his stinging eyes: “Mother, I need your solace. A terrible shadow stalks me and I fear it shall catch me soon.”

Behind him, Jyte’s even breathing breaks for a long, slow inward draw, and he knows she’s awoken.

“Suvi. Watch the path.”

This time, though there is no difference in inflection that he can hear, Suvi blinks and turns her face to the window. Jyte pulls him closer by the flank, setting her knee near the soft hollow between his legs. It doesn’t matter whether she means anything by the placement; their ankles hook together like brambles feeding in on themselves, and it’s all he can notice.

He resists the need to jolt from the bed, hardly breathing, until she relaxes again.

“Bad dreams, branchling?” she murmurs, sleep-heavy and close. 

Her wrist rests across his waist, both a question and a promise. If he pulls away now, this time she’ll be close behind, and after that, much like the shadow, he’ll be powerless to try and reason her away. Niikolais doesn’t think he could move anywhere, like this, not even to pursue the space he so desperately wants.

When he also doesn’t answer, she props herself up on an elbow as quickly as hopping to battle, the gentle weight of her pressing on him. He makes himself shake his head. “No,” he says; stilted, hoarse, “merely a Nightmare.”

A moment passes in silence before Jyte exhales. “A nightmare.” 

She sinks down again with a grace the norn aren’t known by, soft and warm at his back. Having her so close would have been unbearable earlier in the evening, but now that the hearth has died down to ash, she doesn’t feel as overwhelming; closer to a lump of charcoal smouldering deep inside him somewhere frantic and terribly flammable. A controlled burn, a slow consumption that promises to take him piece by piece.

Where had the spark that lit it come from? 

No, more importantly—which of them struck the match?

He takes a deep, but steady, breath, perfumed by cinders and the frost that creeps beneath the door. A great, invisible hand presses in around his throat, terrible in its tenderness, coaxing him open. He was still a sapling the last he allowed anyone but his mother and his siblings to see those parts of him growing below the bark.

Jyte, unaware, says, “I’ll have Suvi guard the door, if it will help you rest.”

And slowly, like that, she begins to get her fingers in the cracks.

“…Jyte, I’m not concerned with—Kelda, or the blizzard. Don’t you see? The movement of the world has gone on without us.”

He had thought she was still before.

“Spirits,” she breathes at last. “It _would have_ gone on, branchling, no matter where in Tyria you took to. It goes on still.” 

Jyte’s arm curves closer and gives an easy squeeze. “‘Don’t try to walk autumn’s path in winter.’ To speak your language, you can only ever follow the roads that life has left open to you.”

Niikolais presses his lips together. He doesn’t want to speak lest he spill the arguments stuck behind his teeth all at once. Sylvari born before dawn are the diplomats of his people, for whom the darkling morning hours are like the day, and Aife sleeps lightly and rouses quickly. This road is still open. 

But unless she has has spent time in the company of other sylvari and not mentioned it, she cannot know the cycles, and if she doesn’t know the cycles, then he cannot fault her for comforting him as she only knows how.

“Whatever business you have with your kin can wait until dawn; for now, _sleep._ ”

He could mention the countless hours he has spent in the Reach’s sprawling libraries, forgoing sleep, poring by lantern-light over poorly-worded correspondences he was told to revise and revise again.

He could ask her whether he heard true that norn sometimes travel through the night to warn slumbering havens of coming danger.

But beyond all that, he doubts any reason could sway her, because Jyte’s mind, once made up, can hardly be swayed by anything.

Niikolais screws his eyes shut, since she cannot see him do it, and murmurs an aborted, “How can I…” before falling silent.

The logs settle in the fireplace, snapping embers onto the hearth to cool. She takes a breath, holds it. Lets it out again without speaking. She has chosen to soothe him, and while her even breathing by his ear is a comfort he would never tell her of, Jyte’s arm over him doesn’t fall loose again, not even when he refrains from further argument. 

And despite this, despite everything, the longer he lays here, wholly wrapped up in her, the more he feels sleep come around him like a warm blanket, tempting him with a final night in her company. Then the bed shifts and Niikolais feels her untangle from him and sit up.

“Branchling,” comes her voice at last. It resounds in his chest even when she pitches herself low, as she does now. “Look at me.”

That tone invites his compliance, not merely his consideration.

He rolls onto his back and turns his face towards her. Though she hasn’t physically moved, her great size means she still seems to bend out over him, soft gray and somber-eyed in the dim light, the cut of her shirt dangerously loose. It’s instinctive that he snaps a hand up to close the parting of the fabric.

“Here,” he says, hushed as a morning breeze, “I’m looking.”

What she makes of that is beyond him. He gets the feeling she doesn’t think much of it at all, looking instead for the knot in him that’s big enough for a norn to get in through and start pulling out everything she doesn’t understand.

She won’t find one, not for all the searching in the world.

Oh, but she searches for it all the same, her brow furrowed all the while. That, too, is intrinsic to the will of her people. Or better yet, to their stubbornness. Her troubled gaze wanders across his face and lower, as low as his stomach, but discerns nothing she hasn’t seen before, and he know it must frustrate her to know the seams are there, and yet find no way in.

At length, she puts the undertaking to rest, and her brow clears. He expects her to sink back down, but instead, “Niikolais,” she says, in a timbre that’s benign enough.

She hasn’t touched him, still has not moved, and neither has he; but he can tell the moment she speaks that something has changed between them. He feels it like the first current in the air before a storm, dancing across his skin, making his insides flutter for reasons beyond vine and thorn.

She makes him sound… beautiful.

“You called me by my name.”

Norn are more than their drunken festivities, brawls, and conquests. They wear solemnity and pride in equal measure. Those things have a different heft to them than their anger does—but heft is heft and can still leave people stricken to their core, should they let it. Jyte has donned that solemnity now, and by the Pale Tree, he wishes he knew how not to let it strike him.

Her lashes lay dark across her skin as she looks down at his face, the apples of her cheeks rosy, soft enough to kiss. In his mind’s eye, he imagines himself laying a hand across her shoulders and pulling himself up so that he can, then pressing his lips to her knowing half-smile next, as many times as she’d allow it.

Would she burn to the touch? He wonders whether she’d laugh or just hold him and let him boil alive like that.

He wants to know so badly, with a suddenness and depth that disarms him. The need has risen from below as inexorably as the sun: nothing much at first save for a sliver, but now that he’s looked again, the light has spilled across everything it can touch, painting it all in vibrancy. 

Niikolais’ fingers curl minutely in her blouse.

“…Didn’t you?”

He sees her glance down at his hand and consider something. Settle on something. She takes his hand between her dark, tattooed fingers and easily tugs it away, so that her blouse again falls open. The she presses it palm-up into the furs at his shoulder, and when he instinctively tests the resistance, he finds it firm. His breath catches and shivers out in a rush. It’s so clear in the silence, like a bullet cutting the air. 

That makes her smile, but only with her eyes. Their corners crinkle up.

“Go back to sleep, branchling,” she says.

——————————————

ii. the grove

 

Jyte has never been anywhere so alive as the Grove. Every inch of it is breathing, blooming; heavy with laughter and conversation and crickets that chirp in the folded leaves of dewdropped plants. Returning to the great tree’s shade seems to rejuvenate Niikolais in a way that simple rest cannot; a balm to sink his tired mind into. She doesn’t understand, nor does she entirely wish to. 

The Dream will never mean anything to her.

As the waypoint closes behind them, Jyte checks her pockets and finds them emptied save for a handful of copper coins. _Opportunistic little anklebiters,_ she thinks, not without some distaste. She’d been the one to insist she join him, however, and so she refrains from saying anything too incisive aloud.

She takes a look around and straightens from the woozy slouch she’d fallen into, an errant grin spreading across her face. Waypoint sickness can’t distract her from this. “By Raven,” she marvels, gazing well up into the vast canopy, “there’s no end to Tyria, is there?”

Hoelbrak was built on a foundation of glacier ice and her kin’s own will to survive. Where Asgeir and Hrothbeir had chipped away until they had carved out a place for the norn to prosper, the sylvari tree has grown unchecked, grown tall, and is strikingly pale.

“I couldn’t say.” The branchling is as pragmatic as ever. “I don’t expect anyone shall until the day we simply… do.”

“I suppose not.” She chuckles and gives his shoulder a squeeze, leaning down so she can use a lower timbre. “Branchling, you’ve returned the favour. It isn’t often that a norn feels dwarfed by anything, least of all by a tree.”

Like she’d thought he might, he begins to smile. “The Pale Tree humbles us all. She—and the Dream—are our guiding light.”

Jyte fights to keep her own smile on her face. 

The Dream is as real as the six human gods or the Spirits of the Wild; he has told her this, and she believes him. But she can’t help how naive it sounds, the way some sylvari talk as though what the Dream gives them is… Spirits, anywhere near good enough to build a thought upon.

There are saplings who have never strayed from home, knowing that adventure and terrors exist, but not what kind of twisting their personality might do to those things. Experience alone can determine whether a hunter shall flee her enemy or fell it.

Like children, so many of them. Green to it all: the glory _and_ the gore.

“Why don’t we start off with a guided tour?” she asks, in what she considers to be a tactful side-step. “Guiding lights sounds like talk for when we have ale in our bellies.”

He gives her a flat look she of course takes great joy in laughing at. 

“All things are better with ale in the belly, branchling.”

“For a norn, perhaps.”

“Aye,” she agrees, “and norn I am, for better or worse.”

The branchling sighs and makes an interesting remark: “I suppose we’ll soon find out which of those it is. Come, this way.”

He gestures for her to follow. Unlike in the Shiverpeaks, where he had constantly held himself taut, his stance now is poised, at rest. Graceful as willows on a breezy morn. Jyte bites her thumb to quell another smile and halves the distance between them in a few loping strides.

She’s led through tunnels and flowering boughs until she can’t fathom anymore how deep or high the Grove could possibly go. The sylvari have built flowerbud cottages in the tree’s boughs and woven bridges from its roots; far, far below, the pools of deep, cold water the tree drinks from have been carpeted by water lily so large that even she could stand upon them. 

Of course, Tyrian reality has found its place among the whimsy. They pass a prison with thorns for bars. The three orders have each staked out their own piece of sylvan paradise and do their damndest to catch their ear as they wander by. She even hears talk of the Mist War; talk like what had tempted a younger her at the stage of Might and Main.

But no more.

At last, when he deems his tour complete, they scale the great helix back aboveground. “There is one more place I’d like to show you,” the branchling says, tending a violet frond that’s fallen over his shoulder while they walk. “I think it will be more to your liking.”

They stop in before a building that’s easily thrice as large as any Firstborn’s cottage. Its fungal exterior and wide, waxen leaves spiral well into the canopy above. Whatever it is has grown to span at least two floors.

“What’s this?”

Niikolais shrugs vaguely and steps inside.

She whistles, but Suvi alones comes back to her when she does that. “Did you leave your manners in the Shiverpeaks, branchling?” 

When she stoops and enters after him, she finds the space within has been filled by mushroom tables and smaller mushroom chairs. Many are already occupied by sylvari who are not at all shy about being caught making eyes at her.

“Is it just me, or did a mountain just walk into the nursery?”

“Not so loud, Gideon. She might leave.”

Jyte gives the offending sylvari a wink and a grin. He stares, then covers his face, sinking low into the chair.

“Would you look at that; I think she likes you.”

“Or _maybe_ sh—she’s consi… considering how you’d look arranged in a vase.”

“Please. Please, stop,” Gideon begs from behind his leaves.

By the bear, they’re _drunk_.

“A sylvari tavern—I’ll be.”

Wearing his usual sobriety—but hopefully not for long, if he’s brought her here—the branchling gestures to an empty table near the centre of the space, where the ceiling vaults the highest. 

“Drinks, if you’ll have them,” he offers, coming so close to imploring her that Jyte’s eyebrow ticks. “They won’t hold a candle to norn ale, but perhaps you would still indulge me?”

He needn’t ask a third time, though it’d amuse her greatly if he did. “I’ll indulge you as much as you please, branchling. Just remember it’ll be on your copper.”

“I don’t mind,” he swiftly assures her. His brow pinches when he hears how swiftly.

Jyte’s humour leaves her for a moment, then, and suddenly adrift in an openness of her own making, she doesn’t know what else to say. She shows her teeth in a wolfish grin instead and ducks back through the doorway to claim a table outside, first testing its strength with a booted toe.

Niikolais follows like a lost pup. 

Since he has given her no other recourse but to say _something_ , she says, “We’ll see whether you still don’t mind once I’m through,” and upnods towards the building. “Go on, start me off with whatever you like best. We’ll sit outside, if that’s fine by you. I want to watch the passers-by.”

And given the stares she’s been receiving, the passers-by don’t see a point in waiting until she gives them a reason to watch her back. It’s charming.

“I—alright.” He is back to looking harried. “Wait here for me.”

“What do you think I’m going to do, branchling? Climb the tree?” 

The look he gives her seems to say that he wouldn’t put it past her, least of all once she has a drink in her belly. 

“Bah…” Jyte’s smile approaches five-alarm as she waves him off.

Forget scaling the tree. Seating herself without breaking anything will prove to be enough of a challenge. These chairs could maybe take a norn child, were they slight of build, but she stood taller than a dolyak betime she was eight. In the end, she uses the table, and even that is low.

The branchling returns not long after with two amber-filled jugs in hand. A server carrying a third walks uncertainly in tow. “I’ve brought some autumn nectar from last year’s har—oh, Jyte…”

She rolls her head lopsided on her shoulders and shrugs at them both. Surely he wouldn’t prefer she act like something she’s not and crush the toadstools. 

“Don’t look at me like that. Taking that gate cost so much coin I couldn’t even pay to repair my own belt buckle.”

“It’s quite alright.” The server sets his pitcher at her hip and recoils delightedly, like she’s an exciting new animal he isn’t sure won’t bite. “In any case, I’ve never seen a norn up close before. You’re awfully large, aren’t you?”

She turns her grin on him next. “From where I sit, it’s you all who look awfully small.”

The branchling rolls his eyes and pushes another pitcher into her hands. “I promise you her character makes for most of it. Thank you for your help, Beoir. We won’t keep you.”

“No trouble at all,” says Beoir, quite placidly. “I’ll just be inside if you’d like anything else.”

Jyte looks down at the jug Niikolais handed her. She’d barely consider the entire thing a flagon’s worth. 

The server follows her gaze, likely thinking the same thing. “Some mulberry wine, perhaps?”

She laughs. It starts deep in the belly as a rumble and comes out a cadenced bark. “Go ahead and bring it all out! Why not?” Then, as the branchling sits primly beside her, she nudges him lightly with her elbow. “What was that, ‘my character makes for most of it’? I like that.”

The skaalds will have no end of stories about the sylvari who likes to tell his jokes straight-faced.

He nobly refuses to meet her eye. “Before you bring up your skaalds again, you already know quite well that it’s true. You are impulsive and adventuresome and buoyant,” he says, suddenly faltering, “and you are all those things in norn proportions.”

 _Buoyant?_ Jyte thinks. 

“Aren’t I allowed to be?”

“Yes, of course.” And again, he’s surprisingly quick to say. “I would hate for you to be anything less. But it’s very easy for us to think of norn as merely ‘big things’, isn’t it? I fear we may sometimes get caught up in your size and forget--until we have spent time in your company--what it is that truly makes you giants.”

Jyte raises her brows and her pitcher of—well, he was right; it’s certainly not ale. But she does like it. “Oh?” She doesn’t bother to disguise her mirth when she’s in her cups (no matter how shallowly). 

Speculation is a new side to the branchling. A good side. She’d almost gotten used to the way he acts so deeply rooted in the world, as though he had fallen from the vine and planted himself where he landed, right there at the base of the Pale Tree. 

But she supposes roots have to spread eventually, and sometimes, things mix with all that was already there in the soil, and in the end, an entirely new plant sprouts than what anyone expected. When it comes to sylvari, it’s a little late for the sprouting, but Jyte doubts they ever stop sending out new roots.

A shame that he decided to do it now, though, and make delve out of a dredge mine.

“It’s your spirit, isn’t it?” Niikolais frowns, testing the thought out. “I don’t mean Bear or Wolf; you seem so immense through how you act and the legends you seek to attain, not simply due to the space you take up.”

“Hm…” 

Jyte knocks the jug back and reaches for the second. This one to nurse without drinking from, and hopefully buy herself a few extra seconds to wrestle her twitching lips back under control. She enjoys these talks for reasons she cannot explain.

Spirits, she can’t even explain it to herself.

“I like your take on it, branchling. _What makes us giants_...” She lets herself think about it for a moment, seeing as he’s already brought the topic to play. “If you mean bloodlines, not even the skaalds could tell you that. It’s lost knowledge. The kodan believe our races were once one and the same, but if you ask me why the humans first called us giants, it’s because, well… norn are much larger than they are.”

He had perked up at the kodan, snared by vague history she had even more loosely quoted, but he leans back again, looking like she’s lured him with sweet nectar and swapped it for brine at the last second.

“For such a prideful race,” he sniffs, washing away the taste with his own drink, “I’m surprised that you would settle for that stance.”

She gestures for the sylvari server to bring the wine.

“Come now, at least crack a smile. You told me yourself that not everything makes for a great tale.”

“When I said that, I had the lives of ordinary farmers in mind, not an entire people’s history,” he tries to chide, but the smile comes despite himself, and then actual laughter. She rests her chin in hand and watches with awe as it shapes his features. “Of all the stories you would choose not to linger on, to think it would be the one concerning your own creation! Why are you looking at me like that?”

“No reason,” she says easily. “Now! Let the mulberry flow, and open your ears to the tale of the Dragonstorm ten thousand years ago.”

She’s no skaald. She forgets, again, how young he is, and the ways that should change how she tells her story. A skaald would not forget the history the younger races, and even some younger norn, might not know.

Yet he listens to all her asides, even the ones he could only have a passing interest in, and he fills her cup whenever it empties. Some drinks are flowery and sweet, some are bitter, and some look and taste like sap that has been made to be thin. By the time her tangled stories come to a close, Jyte is pleasantly warm-faced and riding the simplest pleasure she’s known since the day of their meeting.

“If you ever make it back to the Shiverpeaks, I know a few storytellers who’d like to have you for an audience.”

Something about that makes him hesitate. “I will make it back,” he replies at length. “I would like to make it back.”

The dense foliage has made tracking the hours by the sun’s path more difficult than she’d like. But she knows how quickly she can down a drink—and she has downed more than a modest few. 

For good measure, Jyte downs another and gives his shoulder a hearty clap, saying, “Ahh, the mountains’ve got their song in you now, branchling. I’ll see you again sooner than later, if you’re to come back at all.” 

The branchling exhales, pulling together a delayed smile, and he worries a spore in the table without speaking. 

“Now, seeing as it kept you awake ‘til the dawning and took all we had to get here, shouldn’t you get on with your business?”

“Yes, of course I should--and I shall--but…”

Where did this reluctance come from? These striplings change their minds as often as the wind changes direction. He would have spent every copper to his name to take the first waypoint he saw at Concordia, and ride it as far as the coin would take him. He would have gladly been dropped in a blizzard somewhere in the Pass that very night, had she not talked him into the lodge.

“What is all this ‘hurry up and wait’? We’re here. Don’t tell me you’ll miss me, branchling.” 

She tries to make it a joke, make their parting a gentler one, but Niikolais catches her gaze at that, unflinching and earnest, and he murmurs, “You know it’s true that I will.” And with so few words, he places such an albatross about her neck that she feels the earth give beneath her feet.

⸙⸙⸙

Reading Jyte is like gazing into the eye of a storm. Sometimes all he needs is right there in front of him, but it is rare, and every other time, there is nothing but gravitas and a feeling like something potentially terrible has begun to happen just beyond his line of sight.

Like right now, as he sits laid bare before her, and her drinking hand gradually slackens around the cup.

Before she can reply, a voice from behind repeats, “‘Branchling’?” and every inch of Niikolais’ body seems to spark with unleashed energy, as in the scarce few seconds before the lightning strike. “That’s certainly a step up from sapling. Or is it?”

The storm beyond the eye, mutters the voice of his that only ever speaks up once it’s too late to repeat it aloud. He hesitated for too long, waited too long to move, and has found himself caught between the eye and the maelstrom proper.

And when he grudgingly turns his head, not unlike pushing open a heavy and rusted door, he finds his brother standing at his shoulder, something wicked and exultant gleaming in his eyes. His grin is all teeth. “Do introduce us, brother dearest.”

Jyte sets down her tankard with finality.

“O, Pale Mother,” Niikolais says.

Despite his prayer, Jyte does not come into a sudden sobriety. She keeps her legs open, boots propped on the next table over, boasting a face flushed with drink and personality. Like a tanner inspecting a pelt, she looks Valthika up and down, and in his waggled, flippant wave, she seems to find whatever it is she could possibly be looking for.

“Niikolais, you didn’t tell me you had a bramble patch for a brother!” The mad grin on her face is an audible thing as she loudly—too loudly—claims to ‘see the family resemblance’.

Valthika’s grin splits wider. “Oh, she is _delightful_ ,” he says, sounding like he might actually mean that, but more importantly, has every intention of tormenting him until he is wilting. “How could you keep her company all to yourself, Niikolais?”

“Ha!” Jyte slams an open palm down on the tabletop. It’s loud, but Niikolais knows it’s entirely drunken bravado; she is in a good mood, despite the nearing of their parting. Such is the way of a norn deep in their cups. 

“Nothing in Tyria can keep a norn if they do not want to be kept. Raven’s wisdom blesses those who realize it, and may any who think otherwise find themselves as resilient as Bear.”

She uncrosses her heels, crosses them again the other direction, and laughs fit to shake the thatched canopy. It draws the eye of several sylvari conversing nearby. 

Valthika doesn’t answer right away. His poisonously bright eyes dart sidelong and catch Niikolais’ mortified stare. “And which of those has my dear brother has opted for, I wonder?” he croons at last.

Something like vexation bolts up his spine and makes him straighten. “I suppose you’d consider it supercilious of me to say the former.” 

In response, Val cheerfully shows his teeth; but of course he considers it that. 

“In any case, to the norn, the raven spirit also holds dominion over lesser-known spheres than merely cunning and wisdom—watchfulness over the spirits of the dead, for example. I thought that was quite an uncommon combination, Valthika.”

Valthika’s brow ticks slightly higher. “A bitter tincture, I’m sure,” he says lightly, though there’s a sudden sharpness there, like a rock in the shallows that goes unseen until tread upon. “Myself, I’ve often found the three go hand in hand.”

“I’m sure you must mean when you come across a raven picking clean a set of bones.”

By now, Jyte’s smile has gone. Perhaps she’s realizing her hand in testing the tenuous friendship between brothers, but Niikolais doubts the straightforward norn would be particularly familiar with the art of sowing barbs in among the rest of the garden. 

No, she’s likely still puzzling it out. And, indeed, a frown has folded her brow.

“Enough,” she says, interrupting Valthika’s brittle laugh. “’Tis the sharpness of your tongue that would please Raven, branchling, but you growl like Wolf on the eve of battle. If you were norn, you would run with the pack.”

“That’s hardly the point I meant to make,” Niikolais says while Valthika clears his brow. He wishes it were Naefula standing beside him instead.

“No, no; I can picture it,” Valthika comments, lacking all Naefula’s grace, full of chickweed instead. “Particularly when he bares his teeth—yes, precisely like that.”

Jyte points at Valthika next. “Ah, but so would you.”

When his brother smiles all the way to his molars, the way he does now, he looks positively infernal. “That’s right, you have me figured out! However, unlike the dear ambassador, here, I have my own Pact already that I’m quite content to run with.”

By the Tree, Niikolais wishes he could swat him right between the pointed ears. Just _once_.

Giving Valthika a look of clouded scrutiny, Jyte goes to squat down before him. Even like that, she still towers over him by more than a head. It had always made Niikolais very aware of her size when she did this to him, so it’s nearly too much to see her do it to his brother now, as she claps a great palm to his shoulder and Valthika bends backwards, raising his hands in surrender.

“Do you have a problem with the company he’s been keeping, weedling?” she asks, dangerously soft.

Niikolais isn’t sure Valthika has ever looked more delighted.

“Weed—ha, weedling?” he says, on a breathless exhaled laugh, his eyes and grin so wide it makes him look rictus.

“That’s right: weedling.” She matches the expression to the tooth. “Like branchling, but for weeds.”

Val’s eyes light up further. “That’s very clever— _actually_ ,” he says, “I do believe we’ve fully misunderstood one another. I meant to infer that, being Pact commander, I already run with a—it’s a play on—alright, we’ll leave that one be. Now, in the spirit of full disclosure, I’m sure I can’t object to how Niikolais spends his time, but, knowing my brother, I expect he has taken more issue with the company he’s kept than I could.”

Jyte knows already, of course. He’d made it abundantly clear at the beginning that he would have preferred to be anywhere other than bundled up in her greatcoat on the top of a mountain, and she’d waited patiently while he tired himself out on his disdain. Then, once he was stretched too thin to do anything but watch and listen, she had caught him.

This doesn’t stop a cold pit from blossoming in his stomach. Dear though he finds her now, he holds little trust in a norn’s memory (or temper) after they’ve tested, extensively, how strong sylvari nectars really are.

“He what?” Jyte lifts her chin, a sidelong gaze slanted towards him. It is heavy-lashed and serrated. Wolf certainly smiles on him now—through a norn woman’s eyes. “Is that right.”

“I’m sure you’ve noticed he tends towards the painfully bureaucratic,” Valthika says in a perfect affectation of remorse. “Look at him, so straitlaced into his uniform that he can’t even laugh, lest it split those extravagant seams—I’ve never quite been able to tell whether he actually knows how to smile, or the Pale Tree simply didn’t bless him with the ability.”

He hardly bothers to even mock at a whisper, perhaps hoping it will make his ears burn.

“Pah,” Jyte says dismissively, “he has the spirit of a norn, this one.” Bringing him closer by the hand still upon his shoulder, she grins very close to his ear, and says in an undertone nearly as poor as his, yet with twice the cheek, “ _I_ have found the way to undo those laces.”

Valthika’s face erupts in frightful glee. At the same time, Niikolais feels something best compared to someone running a cold finger up his spine. “That’s quite enough!” he snaps as Jyte guffaws and hefts back to her full height. “By the Tree, I beg you both stop with this nonsense and let me _speak_.”

“Yes, Niikolais, please do weigh in,” Valthika says brightly. He takes his own chin and holds it in a poised hand, as though nothing in the world could draw his attention more thoroughly than the chance to hear what his brother has to say. The venomous look Niikolais gives him does little to deter it. 

“I refuse to stand here and waste my time listening to you speculate how much I must have hated the time I _chose_ to spend in the Shiverpeaks—and debate how much of a mossback I am,” he says, terse with displeasure, “without even the grace to do so in private quarters. I’ve come back as I have for a reason, and it isn’t to be held a captive audience while you two play whatever game this is.”

Mother, he aches down to his very soul. Rising, he realizes that the thicker bark along his biceps and thighs has found a way to interlock with his armour. “Jyte, if you don’t mind, I would like a word with my brother, alone.”

Shrugging easily, Jyte goes to straddle a chair and sets her chin in an open palm, elbow to her raised knee. She’s remarkably even-tempered for a norn who has just been lectured.

“I am in no rush,” says she. “These meads have not yet slaked my thirst, and I think I intend to explore this city of yours on my own for a while, before I go.”

The flush of intoxication is heavy in her cheeks.

“Visit the Dreamer’s Terrace, if you can,” he says, gentling, “and meet the noble souls of our mother’s firstborn.”

“Hm.” Jyte lifts the pitcher to her lips again.

This he can only imagine is a true dismissal, and he cannot help that it aches in him. He turns to Valthika, ignores his facetiously proffered arm.

“We’ll speak outside.”

The Scholar’s Terrace is blessedly quiet this time of day, with few eyes to linger and disapprove his treatment of the renowned Pact commander, slayer of Zhaitan, cleanser of Orr… On and on and on. Niikolais pulls him into the cradle of hanging wisteria.

“What are you doing here?” he hisses. “I thought you made it quite clear you preferred to send your correspondences through Fort Trinity, so you can imagine my surprise—”

But Valthika seems to bear no interest in giving an answer without first leading him for a while along a fool’s path. His brows reach well into the brambles at his crown, and his teeth are sharp enough to cut. 

“Niikolais? With a _norn_?”

He catches himself making a series of strangling, grabbing motions at the air where Val had been standing. “You don’t have to say it like that, you accursed creeping vine.”

“Now, now, brother,” says Valthika, laughing as he skips backwards beyond his reach. “Don’t get your roots in such a knot. If I’d known all it would take to get you to loosen that bureaucratic collar of yours was a little norn culture, I’d have dumped you in the Shiverpeaks years ago. —Pardon me, I suppose I should say _big_ norn culture.”

A flare of heat goes through him at the way Valthika stresses the word. 

“You ought to take heed of how widely you smirk, brother,” he threatens, “or else everyone will see that forked tongue of yours as well as I do.”

Val mocks a hiss and places his hand over his heart. “You wound me,” he says, sounding utterly unscathed. “I see you still love to take insult to anything you cannot best by words or by sword.”

“I can best you by either, if you wish to test your skill—”

He cheerfully taps the dagger at his hip. “Your sword to my dagger? Thank you, but—no. Now, seeing as you’ve mentioned tests of skill, what I’d really love to know is which of these ideas I’ve had is on the mark: either you also cannot best the norn woman, no matter your weapon of choice, or you didn’t hate the Shiverpeaks as much as I’m sure you wanted to.”

Niikolais spots a pale glow beginning to flutter in the backs of his hands and jerks his face to the side, hoping to delay his brother’s notice. “‘Wanted to’? Continuing to insist I’m a joyless stick in the mud does not make it true, Valthika.”

“Oh, please.” Valthika waves a hand. “Pardon me if I don’t act like I believe your leaves have been trembling all this time in anticipation of the norn who would sweep you off your feet and carry you through the frozen mountains.”

“No more than yours trembled knowing that you would be asked to direct the Pact, and yet here we both are.”

There’s no satisfaction to be had for either of them in that dig, only dirt. Niikolais has not let the striations—fine stress lines of black and green—emerging in Valthika’s plumbark go unnoticed. Commanding is leaving its mark on him, as all Wyld Hunts do. 

“You’ll have to forgive me my lack of tact,” says Val after only the scantest, electric pause, “given the vast differences in our areas of expertise… but one of these matters concerns defeating the five remaining Elder Dragons before they destroy all of Tyria, and the other is my brother’s nectared alpine blossom.”

Warming sap flows into the whorls of his cheeks. “Valthika—”

“Niikolais, you’re an absolute daisy for the woman.” As he leans closer, his slanted eyes narrow with glee, and Niikolais knows it’s too late distract him now. “Look at yourself—you’re luminescing. Or perhaps you mean to tell me we’ve found a miraculous pocket in the Grove where twilight comes early, and only for you?”

Niikolais shivers and jabs a pink-burnished finger up beneath Valthika’s chin. “I would suggest not accusing anyone of pining,” he says in a hot whisper, “so long as you continue trailing your roots after Firstborn Trahearne.”

Still laughing, Val wraps sinuous fingers around his forearm and pulls his hand away in an irresistible grip. “I would, quite literally, never dream of it.” 

Normally Valthika’s face arranges itself in some manner of permanent, devilish grin, but just this once, it’s uncharacteristically clear of mischief, despite the handpicked turns of phrase he continues to lick him with. That may be why, regardless of his better instincts, Niikolais doesn’t silence him.

“The norn have done something for you that Naefula and I couldn’t—I’m _happy_ for you, Niikolais,” he says softly. “Let me be happy for you.”

“I have not stopped you from doing anything.” He feels abruptly disarmed. With a deft twist, he draws his arm from his brother’s grasp as he might, in turn, disarm his opponent. “You did that yourself when you set aside whatever reason you must have for being here so that you could harass me.”

“You don’t assume them to each be branches of the same tree? Heartwarming.”

“I _assume_ someone of your status”—and relationship to the Pale Tree—“would have better matters to tend to than petty antagonism.”

“Don’t be silly,” says Val. “Of anything else in the Grove, it is only natural that my brother take top priority. Especially when he has been keeping secrets from me.”

Niikolais feels his lip curl. “Precisely what have I kept from you? That I’ve befriended a norn woman, travelled across the Shiverpeaks—both things you have done to excess? Tell me, how best should I keep you informed to the minutiae of my daily life, considering you couldn’t abide the ‘stifling embrace’ of the Dream that is meant to connect us?”

He successfully taps the vein with that. Valthika blinks once, as though distantly surprised to have come these crossroads yet again, and cuts a flinty glance towards him. “No, Niikolais. Stop chasing after fights you know have no point in winning or losing. It gets tiring always dancing these circles with you.”

There is not a single verbal flourish to be heard.

Niikolais reigns himself in, but barely. “Then—”

“Now, if only you listened to yourself as closely as you wish I would. Didn’t you say I should ‘take heed’ of my smirking?” With barely a pause for breath, Val keeps on, as if to say that no amount of eyerolling will stop him. “Firstly—there hasn’t been a day where I’m not completely aware of it. It’s my best feature. And if I’m to mind that, then should you not extend the same courtesy to the dagger you have for a tongue?”

“I will—”

“But! The most enjoyable matter at hand is that I’m certain I’ve heard particular that turn of phrase more often in the Shiverpeaks than the Grove.”

“That may be more to blame on your wretched refusal to ever _visit here_ ,” Niikolais bites back, and with some bleak satisfaction follows with the sole natural conclusion he can draw from that: “Which more than likely makes your standing before me an act of necessity. I won’t be so optimistic as to entertain that you’ve chosen to take my advice and help our mother interpret the Dream, so kindly give me a little more to go on.”

Valthika makes a display of shuddering, strictly because he knows it bothers him. “I’m afraid I left my beloved connection to her in my other pack. Perhaps another day… As it were, I’m here on official Pact business. Very hush-hush—even I’m not wholly certain which ambassadors ought to be informed.”

Again he dances back as Niikolais’ hand instinctively clenches. “Well,” he amends, “I suppose I ought to tell you, since you’ve been so busy playing about in the blizzards that you might not have heard. But there again, given the circumstances, you may have in fact personally seen…”

A series of interlocking bark plates further tighten across his shoulders. “By the roots, Valthika, if this is truly of any import, you will spit it out.”

To his surprise, Valthika spits it out. “I have come here to organize a summit—a meeting of diplomatic powers, if you will—at the Pale Tree’s recommendation,” he says swiftly, and ignores the way Niikolais’ brows spring higher. “During which we should all hope Tyria’s leaders might address the tiny matter of Mordremoth’s awakening. Provided they can set aside their squabbling for that long.”

The brambles in Niikolais’ chest seem to move, the way a living thing might move when it hears its name being called and must begin the task of shaking off its drowsing slumber. This is it. Yes—this is shadow that has been lurking behind him.

“Did you ever receive word about Concordia, by chance, while you were out on your wintry escapades?” Val asks, with laser-focused curiosity.

“I didn’t have to receive word.” He lifts a tense hand and holds it to his chest. “Valthika, I was there. The dragon’s thorn destroyed it and nearly all who were stationed inside. That’s why I’ve returned home; to confer with the Pale Tree.”

A pang of guilt lances through his heart. He should have cut the venture short far sooner than he did. He should have gone back to his work well before he and Jyte came upon a palpable demonstration of the dragon’s reach. 

But—if he had, then what would he have brought back to the Grove? 

Valthika would be pulling him into this conversation near-blind.

“Of everywhere in the Shiverpeaks, she chose to take you to a Pact outpost? I wonder why that was.” Val doesn’t wonder for long. “In any case. The Concordia incident occurred several weeks ago now, by the way. Yes, yes, the Shiverpeaks are stern and majestic and all those things, but they are also a long way from home. Meanwhile, I’ve been to see the Pale Tree.”

A new look comes over Valthika’s face. He says, with the uncommon air of trying to let someone down easily, “Niikolais. We’re not immune to this dragon like we were to Zhaitan. Mordremoth is clearly capable of breaking through our will, as it did to our dearest secondborn, Ceara. The tactics we relied upon in Orr no longer apply.”

There it is again, that rousing shadow. It grows darker, and nearer, with every word that leaves his brother’s mouth. “I need to speak to our mother,” he says, and begins for the omphalos chamber.

“Yes, you most certainly do.” Valthika catches him by the elbow, and for once, he can see the sternness upon his brow and hear the steel in his voice that have helped him to set down roots where he has, bearing the burden of rallying all of Tyria against everything that would consume it. “But before that, I have an order for you as issued by the Pact Commander.”

Niikolais’ gaze moves past Valthika’s shoulder. Jyte is no longer drinking herself beneath the table. He spots her some ways from where he left her, standing in the shade of the nursery boughs amidst a handful of newly awakened and the incurably curious—laughing as she hefts them into the air, two on each arm. Doubtlessly a show of strength she needed no coercing into.

He feels, abruptly, so very, very tired. Bound to the earth.

“I see. And what would the commander have me do?”

Valthika’s thorned fingers alight on his shoulder. “Nothing too adventurous, dear ambassador. I need you to return to Divinity’s Reach. Meet me there in three days’ time and help Kasmeer and I discredit some unpleasant rumours about the queen’s affiliations with Scarlet Briar. If we succeed, then we should all hope she will feel at liberty to attend the summit.”

The names are new, but the concept itself is rote. Political rivals who have taken advantage of already-turbulent currents and realized they can paint the picture to look however they like, so long as they use the blood in the water to do it.

He glances sidelong and finds no trace of jest in his brother’s features—right up to the moment that Valthika draws a hand to his cheek and pats it, fondly condescending. 

“You do wield some political clout after all these years kissing your nose to the parchment, don’t you, brother?” 

Valthika likely could have purred this with more derision, but he didn’t, and Niikolais cannot quite muster the desire to lash back with all the nightshade in him. “I’ll let the queen’s presence at your summit answer for me, shall I?” he says at last.

“Ah! There it is! The scathing wit we need to beat the ministers at their own soliloquous game. Let’s put it to some proper use, for once, and ensure her adoring public knows for certain that mine is the only sylvari meeting their queen will attend.”

——————————————

iii. divinity’s reach

 

Divinity’s Reach. A testament to human determination. 

Though it cannot hold a candle to Caledon’s verdance, Firstborn Dagonet had grown to love it here, in time, and so too, Niikolais supposes, has he. Never more than on the days he has leave to write his missives from the comfort of a tree’s woven roots, shaded by wisteria and lavender blooms. These are the days he feels most at home.

And he can boast no shortage of missives to write. 

The queen’s soiree had cleared her name, but it had come at the expense of sullying a great many more, many which are of no small renown. In the manner of human politics everywhere, the aviary has become bloated with messages from other aristocrats all expressing a desire to prove their loyalty—or, at times, argue for the former minister Estelle’s temporary lapse in judgement.

Niikolais remembers coming to the city a simple diplomat. He had been a guest and dignitary and nothing more. By the roots, at one time, the people of Divinity’s Reach saw him and he was a face and voice for his people, and those things had garnered him very little attention, all things considered. Whatever had happened to those simple days?

Gone with the passing of the seasons, he supposes. The years he devoted to justifying the place Countess Anise gave him on the queen’s council have, in the end, become what locks him there like the pillars that hold up the ceiling.

Jyte had been closer to the mark than he’d let on, in comparing him to the courtiers. Anise herself calls it a ‘known reputation for being a master swordsman of his idiom’, and he is more proficient in that swordsmanship than ever, helping mediate the peace not only between humans and sylvari, but among the queen’s own people.

Between the two, the latter has proven to be far more contentious, far more consistently.

But he has the wisteria and lavender blooms. Some days, like today, he can even hear Uzolan’s mechanical orchestra trumpeting across the city on the warm morning breeze. 

First, he pens his condolences to Minister Merula for the complications Estelle’s arrest has created in her luncheon invitations. He writes a dozen thank-yous to ministers and nobles who had testified on behalf of the queen—these he deems fit to sign additionally with Pale Tree heraldry of Dagonet’s own design, considering it had been a secondborn who had wreaked havoc on the city to begin with.

A letter each will also have to go to Valthika, wherever he may be now, and to Jyte. Niikolais leaves writing these for last, though knowing that he eventually must lingers over him like a ghost through the writing of each of the others, and by the time comes that he has no more correspondence to issue than to the two of them, the thought nearly paralyzes him.

Not because of Valthika. Valthika will be simple. It is placing the pen to paper with that maelstrom of a woman in mind which runs the risk that he will spill forth with feelings he has denied most ardently up to now.

He hasn’t dared to write her at all yet, though weeks have passed since she had cowed the gate engineer into granting her free passage to Lion’s Arch (not realizing such was always the case) and bade him goodbye, there in the marshalling field.

Absence has made the heart grow so fond, indeed, that it aches for an end.

He wets his pen in violet ink and writes, slow and careful. Pruning back his sentiments as they pass from his heart to his hand.

_Dear Jyte: I find these streets demure after walking by your side along the spine of the world. Though they cannot compare to Timberline’s alpine blooms, find enclosed lavender picked from the gardens of Divinity’s Reach. The scent is said to bring pleasant dreams. May you see your glory before you and think of me._

Hesitating, he holds the pen still above the paper until a droplet of ink falls and dots the parchment. He exhales sharply and frowns at the spreading inkblot, but finally resumes. 

_You may also use it to brew tea, if you wish. Invitations for the summit are finally underway. I believe only the asura have yet to confirm their attendance; should you also wish to attend, please write me._

He isn’t sure why he extends the offer. Jyte has already made clear her thoughts on the barefoot Krytan queen, and has exhibited little patience for the asura, so Niikolais doubts she will be much more tolerant of their leaders.

Yet his heart drowns in the thought of her. 

_Until then, may the stars guide you. Niikolais._

While the ink dries down, Niikolais ties the lavender together with a length of twine. Then he tucks them gently into the crease of the note and seals the envelope with an ivory wax.

The second missive, for Valthika, comes easily: _Brother—kindly inform your progress in organizing the summit. The countess asks that she be supplied the names of all other attending leaders and their consorts prior to the Krytan convoy’s departure to the Grove._

This, too, he seals with ivory wax, and he passes both on to be delivered.

He receives no reply from Jyte, which is hardly surprising given her penchant to roam, but Valthika’s answer comes within the week: _I have charmed Councilor Phlunt into attending, so I do believe we have collected the whole set of world leaders. Let Countess Anise know that she will have her pick of figureheads to scrutinize._

True to form, Anise doesn’t so much as glance up when the Shining Blade admit him into her quarters. Her pen, however, flies across the parchment the moment he begins to speak, and she takes down his words at their conversational pace without a single pause. 

“My thanks, petal. Now, go pick out something lovely to wear. We can’t have you showing up to the summit underdressed, now can we?”

“I’d never dream of it, Countess,” he says, to which a corner of her mouth curls in a slight but wicked smile.

“Now you _do_ have a sharp wit.” Approval—an ill-gotten reward when it comes from Anise. Niikolais can never quite tell whether she’s laughing at him or on his behalf; she remains one of the few whom he cannot read. “A family resemblance, I suppose. Do hold onto that, won’t you.”

“Of course. But if I may, Countess?”

She looks at him now, expression delicate and expectant.

“I had hoped that in light of my involvement in Minister Estelle’s recent arrest, I might make a request.”

Her pink mouth forms a delicate, pouted ‘oh’, and she takes a moment to gently set aside her writings. It is very much a moment. The countess is deliberate in all things and loves to ensure that her audience hangs off her every breath. “This is incredibly unprecedented. You do realize this, don’t you, Niikolais?”

“I do.” 

She narrows her eyes at him thoughtfully. “Then feel free to continue. You have demonstrated your willingness to aid Kryta, so I will hear what you ask, but you mustn’t be disappointed with what it does or does not see fit to bestow upon you in return.”

“I won’t be, Countess.” He folds his arms behind his back so he can worry his fingers out of her sight. Possibly. “It would be remiss of me not to attend the world summit, so of course I shall be in attendance. However, upon its conclusion, whatever the result may be, I would request a leave of absence from Divinity’s Reach.”

“A leave of absence?”

Niikolais stands even straighter, used to (but nonetheless put ill at ease by) Anise’s utter lack of indicative inflection. “I understand my duties lay here, Countess. Yet I feel a yearning in my heart to return to a matter of personal import that was interrupted by events in Concordia… and elsewhere.”

“The Pact commander…” At length, the countess stands and steps around her desk, one hand trailing elegantly along its edge. “Your sibling, is he not?”

“More so than many other sylvari,” he replies smoothly, keeping the bewilderment from his voice. No conversational twist-abouts are coincidental with Anise. “A brother as compared to many distant cousins, if you wish to draw from human bloodlines.”

Anise nods. “This summit was his conception. Truly, a matter of the gravest sincerity is at hand. And you would take leave after all that you yourself have devoted to it?”

“It is—”

“A matter of personal import, yes.”

Flushing, Niikolais inclines his head in a slight bow. “Forgive me, Countess.”

“Have no fear, bonny blossom; it is a leave you are well entitled to.” 

He looks up too quickly to conceal his surprise, and the countess smiles most graciously when she sees it. Which is dangerous.

“Whatever you may think, you have never once been confined to these halls. As the vicious Canach before you, and your brother before him… you are our eyes in the field, a branch laid low by the winds of the world. Have you not already seen the seeds of Mordremoth’s corruption and swiftly turned your face homeward?”

Anise approaches him now, with the unfaltering conviction of a zealot set on a fated path, and each step she takes clicks sharply upon the marble floor and echoes into the vaulted ceilings. Niikolais tamps down on the butterflies that begin their desperate flutter in his belly. 

“Have you not drawn your wit and parried the accusations thrown by our queen’s enemies?” She places two fingers beneath his chin and lifts it the scant difference in their heights. The feeling is—too reminiscent. Unpleasantly so. “It would be a cruelty to keep such a splendorous bloom cooped up away from the light and life you so crave. You, dear ambassador, are never beyond our ability to summon—so go; sow your roots in the very furthest reaches of Tyria.”

“And feed all that I find back to you?” he murmurs, wholly aware of her touch.

Keen is the countess’ smile when she has whetted it on subterfuge and trickery, as she has now. “Just so,” she says, and turns back to her web.

⸙⸙⸙

After the summit, Niikolais yearns for the dreamless sleep. It does not come easily.

The Pale Tree’s tremulous cries call out to him at night. They call out to him during the day, as well, at all times, but it is in the solitude of the quiet hours that Niikolais has no choice but to hear them. Even so far from her as Divinity’s Reach, he cannot escape it, nor the needles it slips into his heart. 

He is plagued by the image of her withering and etiolated, that she did not—could not—respond to his voice or his touch when the wardens had finally permitted him to see her. 

It took but a single day to shake every conviction and every truth he has held himself to with almost dogmatic zeal, to leave them perilously fractured and Niikolais devoid of anything he can replace them with. If not sheltered by their Mother’s bower, then he can think of no place of solace and protection for the sylvari people… nor for anyone else.

Not from Mordremoth. Not from anyone.

Niikolais paces and sits awake and paces some more. Unsent letters pile high on his writing desk atop numerous others that were already there; the entire stack rustles whenever he passes by, which is often.

Whatever the outcome, he told Anise. ‘Whatever the outcome’—how naive. He had not made the promise thinking _any_ outcome would include the waning of the Mother Tree. No sylvari would have ever done. Until now, she has been to them as infallible as the sun.

Mordremoth has shown the world that she is not. Everyone had been watching, everyone had been listening. In the aftermath, it’s clear that of course the jungle dragon wouldn’t stand to be excluded from what every other Tyrian power had been invited to, but at the time, Valthika had struggled to convince anyone that it posed a larger threat than centaurs and Svanir.

What is it about time that allows it to eat away at the memory? They act as though they have all forgotten what dragons can do. It’s like a blatant clue that everyone had purposefully missed, thinking it too obvious to mean anything. 

And though she’d urged him anew that same night to make good on his request, Niikolais finds himself unable to take the leave Anise so freely would give.

He wants the relief he would get in sending his regrets to Glacierhalles lodge, and were these calmer circumstances, he almost certainly would have already done so. But now, in the reality Tyria has found itself in, he can’t so much as bring himself to draft them up. 

What would he say? Jyte wouldn’t take him seriously. She wouldn’t understand why he would feel pressed to beg pardon from her, of all people; now, of all times.

His attempts, quickly discarded in embarrassment, lie scattered like a ransom about his chambers with everything else he hasn’t had the mind to properly phrase.

_Jyte, I cannot explain it; I have been cleft by a blade no mortal can wield and no mender can heal; my faith has come pouring from the wound and left me empty…_

_…how profoundly I wish I possessed even a sliver of your fortitude, and could bolster myself against the uncertainty that has spread through us all…_

_…I am bereft, I feel the absence of you by my side…_

Somehow, he cannot bring himself to discard them completely.

None of the complexities of his heart matter, either, because Jyte has never shown herself to be in possession of reticence or shame, and so she writes to him first:

_I got word from Hoelbrak about the summit. Knut says a dragon attacked the tree. Weakened it. So what will you do, branchling? What’s the next step after a summit?_

Her penmanship is surprisingly precise, devoid of flourish, and her phrasing crisp. He writes back, _I don’t know,_ and discards that, too. More than ever, Niikolais aches for a Wyld Hunt in his heart, but an aching cannot make it more real.

To tell himself that hard ground makes for stronger roots holds little merit when the Tree has begun to wither. To claim, now, that the blossom is brother to the weed feels like something nearly profane.

He lies awake for weeks until he has learned by heart the way the night gives way to first blush and finally sunrise. A turmoil so clouded that he cannot tell one thought or feeling from the other has set up shop inside his head. Until Valthika sends word, there is little he can do but abide it and hope the word is ‘We’ve won’.

At first—for those first few days, he thinks it’s a roiling anger that he feels, such that he has never felt before. Then he considers the feeling again and it seems closer to a hurt that has settled in the very core of him, and then neither seem quite right, and instead it’s a sprawling loneliness that leaves him clutching a hand over the heart sylvari do not have, and yet somehow do.

Let this prove they know the heartache of having one, even if they were to know absolutely nothing else.

The urge grips him at every moment to leap to his feet and pace, to draw his sword and strike against something, as if that will somehow release the tension coiling through every atom of him. More than once, he strides towards his rapier hanging on the wall, only to shake himself of the itch and return to prowling the room like a creature caged.

When one of the servants, Eloise, knocks on his door with the evening’s tea, he finds himself having to turn her away. The sight of her fills him with a dread and a disdain he has never before felt when looking at her—or anyone. 

Are these the people who still spit at Scarlet Briar’s name and demand someone answer for her crimes—the same people who insist that Valthika and the Pale Tree convince them that the answer’s name is Mordremoth?

“Thank you, Eloise; that’s all for tonight. I don’t think I’ll need anything else.”

“Nothing else at all?” the maidservant asks, looking to the teacup rattling in Niikolais’ hand. “I thought, since you’ve not yet gone home, I should…”

He tries to steady his tone but cannot do that, either. “It’s only one night, Eloise,” he says, as gently as possible. “I assure you I am capable of fetching my own things if I find myself in need of them.”

“If you’ve plans to be here for much longer, I ought at least bring you something to eat before retiring.”

Niikolais sets his jaw in a pleasant smile, but it doesn’t take the edge from his voice as he’d hoped it would. “No; just go. Please.”

She looks taken aback in the second it takes her to collect herself. “Of course, ambassador,” Eloise says carefully, and she takes a half-step in retreat and turns towards the door. “I’ll just let the other staff know, shall I?”

“Thank you.” He says this too quickly to be truly polite and feels a pang at her perturbed backward glance before the door closes.

And he is shut away with the beast of his mind once more. He pinches the saucer more tightly between his forefinger and thumb. Somehow, the ripples spreading through the tea make him feel just… awful.

Niikolais watches them for a while. Finally, when it gets to be unbearable, he presses his lips together and sets the teacup on the desk, where it sits untouched until sundown, until dark, until dawn. 

He does not sleep. He writes and writes and writes until he can barely let go of the pen, and when he reads it back, none of it makes any sense. It is just despair and anger and everything confused, put down somewhere safe. Somewhere harmless. Somewhere other than inside himself.

Even though he still can feel it squirming around.

Then at last, on this, a morning of a fell sunrise, Valthika sends word. There are only three lines, written in his spidery hand, and the parchment has been torn and smeared with ink, speaking of the haste with which he had penned it. 

It reads, _The Pact fleet has been struck down over the jungle. Destiny’s Edge and Marshal Trahearne are missing in action. Sylvari have heard Mordremoth’s call and many have answered it._

And oh, the weeping he thought he felt, that he had been sure was an echo of their mother’s sorrow as she reached out to her children, Niikolais realizes is not a weeping or a sorrow at all, but the low strings of the dragon’s voice coming to them from beyond the Dream, extending a cold shivering hand from the drawing dark.

He sees it lurking and bolts the door.

——————————————

iv. silverwastes & verdant brink

 

The night he leaves for the Silverwastes, Niikolais pens a letter. His final letter.

‘His final letter’, really—is it a last will and testament that he writes? But the catch is that he doesn’t know whether or not that is true. Half of him would scoff; the other half is the half that hasn’t slept soundly since Concordia, and more recently has felt a tugging on his soul every hour, every minute, of every day since the Pact fleet had fallen. 

And in truth, whatever it is he decides to put down, it will indeed be his final final of this, the current age; a soon-to-be bygone age. The age ‘before the war on Mordremoth’. And if Valthika is to believed—and Niikolais possesses no doubt that he absolutely must be—it may be the final letter he pens while of his own mind.

There will be no knowing whether the jungle will take him until he has delivered himself into its arms with the intent to stay there.

But he shan’t make the taking easy.

So he fills his pack, sharpens his blade on a whetstone until its edges gleam, and when the sun’s setting bathes his room in a divine glow, he gathers himself until he can finally sit down, and sit still, and _write._

_Jyte: Mordremoth has brought down the Pact fleet and scattered it throughout the jungle. I’ve heard that Mordrem incursions have already begun in Brisban Wildlands, Kessex Hills, and Diessa Plateau in Ascalon._

Nothing to speak of the Shiverpeaks, thank the Tree, but it is too soon to tell whether that will change.

_I know Valthika will fight his way into the jungle without a second thought if it means finding Trahearne and stopping the dragon. I intend to follow. The battle must be taken to the source. Think of me. —Niikolais._

He folds a sprig of flowering sage into the note and seals it with ivory wax.

This time, a reply comes to him on Trygg’s tired wings, reaching him as he stands in the remnant of the colossus that Camp Resolve once had been.

“ _Good,_ ” it says.

That’s all.

——————————————

Mordrem, he’d thought, would be new and monstrous creatures made up of trees and roots, much as the shadow of the dragon had been. They are certainly monstrous, and they are certainly plant, but they mimic shapes he already knows with few exceptions. 

Husks and colocals and trolls—blighted versions—that rend and tear in coordinated onslaughts at every foothold the Pact has managed to stake out. The convoy he travels with is forced to cover ground in bursts and sprint across barren sands between each attack.

“These Mordrem, they’re clever,” is the sentiment Warmaster Medea drums into them. She is a towering and sinewy charr of the Ash Legion, so Niikolais feels content to trust her at her word. “These aren’t your mother’s dragon minion. No matter what they look like, they’ve figured out how to plan—or at least fake looking like they have.”

Each time she creeps out to gauge their next leg, no matter the lighting, she seems able to draw some shadowy cover from the air itself. Niikolais would like to have leave to join her, but until her word, he is confined to a cleft in the rock.

Four wan-faced human recruits sit wedged in the crevice alongside him. Tucked well away from Mordrem eyes, he’s instead subject to each of their mistrustful stares, which is ostensibly worse. They make no effort to be subtle. 

Niikolais holds his chin high and sets his jaw, watching the narrow entrance and ignoring how his nape prickles under their glares. At least one of those present should demonstrate some grace under pressure. As it often does, the responsibility falls to him.

The Mordrem tear at the other side of the wall and make themselves ammunition to break the bastion down. Unaware of the group huddled in terse silence only yards away. The boulders impacting on the camp’s defenses rocks them through the very ground, make everyone shift uneasily, restless as they finger their weapons and wait for the crumbling light that will come when the creatures break through without even meaning to.

Still unseen, the warmaster hisses at them from the cavern’s mouth, “With me, cubs,” and Niikolais tenses minutely. “We’ve got an opening. These things are focused on taking out the bastion. All of you up, before they catch wind of your weak bladders.”

He tests the sharpness of his blade on a thumb, and, finding it keen, pushes himself to stand. As he files after the rest, the charr extends a barely-visible talon and catches him across the chest with its blunt edge. He instantly falls still. So do the others.

“And you. Sylvari,” Medea threatens silkily, “you point that knife anywhere near my recruits and I’ll leave your insides to dry in the sun. Make old Gritblade some kindling for his next signal fire.”

His breath catches. “I understand,” he says, unable to look away from the serrated edge of her claw curving outward from his sternum. She doesn’t remove it just yet.

“You’d be mistaken if you thought I might risk their lives because my tender heart felt like honouring broken alliances. ‘Commander’s brother’—you sylvari all dropped from the same vine, and the whole thing’s gone to rot now.”

“They aren’t broken. Our alliances.” It is far more restrained than Niikolais’ arguments usually go, and he finds himself needing to restrain it further, hearing a recruit scoff behind the safety of Medea’s shoulder—and the instant crack of his own temper that follows. “Not yet. I give you my word, I will sooner die than dishonour the Pale Tree.”

“You’d be right about that,” growls the warmaster. “Now get out there, and by the blood of the Khan-Ur, keep your heads down unless you’d like one of those damned slingers to take them clean off.”

The sun feels cool on his face. It stays feeling that way for a long while, well after it should, until his adrenaline has faded back to a dull hum. Below, the Mordrem have managed to break through Red Rock’s southern wall and, like that, now flood through the gap like insects swarming a corpse.

Their groans and soldiers’ desperate rallying cries both mix together, and that draws Niikolais’ gaze inexorably to the conflict even as he sidles along the narrow precipice that leads back to solid ground.

“What about the bastion?” a recruit—a young man—asks, his voice pitched low, still new to the bleak art of heroism.

“Gritblade can handle it,” says Medea as she places herself between Niikolais and the rest. “He’s been holding Red Rock since before you were wetting yourself in training. You keep your mind on making it west, cub. If this looks bad to you, you aren’t going to like the situation over at Sandfall.”

The ledge ahead comes to a drop where Niikolais had first been made to climb up and cut a portal through the material. He’d crossed paths with Medea and her recruits moments before the Red Rock assault, and he’s quite sure that portal is the only reason the warmaster hasn’t sent him to containment at Camp Resolve. He daren’t try the trick again, because this time he’d be betting against the odds that creatures hear its keening frequency and discover them. 

He gingerly lowers into a crouch and jumps before Medea gets the idea to urge him along. Though Jyte had taught him how to do this—to land on the balls of his feet and keep his knees wide like a frog—he cannot emulate it quite so well on a battlefield as he could in a mossy valley, where there had been no threat of harm.

His weight is too far forward, and so he stumbles and nearly clips a temple on the spires surrounding him, but the Bastion’s slow demise absorbs anything less than artillery fire into the din of the whole. 

Niikolais steadies himself. He cannot tell which side the battle has tipped in favour of. “Warmaster, you next.”

But she ignores his hand and comes down, catlike, on all fours. The recruits follow one after the other, and they are less quiet. They deign to let him brace their descent and within moments he can feel his bark gouging away under the bite of their plate-metal boots.

Warmaster Medea doesn’t wait long for them to get their bearings. She’s already scouted the path ahead by the time the final recruit hits the ground.

“Pick up the pace, mice. We don’t have much time to work with.” She gestures for them to follow from the shade of a yucca tree. 

Niikolais releases a taut breath and tugs at the weave of perception, and once he finds the gap, he pulls it about himself like a cloak. At a glance, it will be as though he isn’t there at all—though Warmaster Medea, and anyone else with a keen eye, will either see the footprints he leaves behind or a slight sylvari-shaped shimmer in the air.

They leave the bastion behind. The air falls ominously still. Medea leads them at a loping run and no one speaks. They don’t have the breath to, nor the desire. She cuts through the few angry devourers that scurry towards them and has turned to discard a chitinous corpse when she curses.

“Burn _me_. Left, cut left.”

No one with so much as the briefest soldier’s training would disobey that tone. Niikolais vaults a stone shelf, ducking behind it, and quickly finds himself jostled between four human companions who all want to share the space with him without actually sharing it. 

Medea is a shadowy flash following them to cover and then on. She cuffs the youngest, dragging him to his feet on her way. “ _And keep going_ , fools! They’re taking Indigo. Move now or start praying to whatever gods you’ve got that you’re stealthier than you think you are.”

And there, now that he looks again, are the dying signal fires on the bluffs above the cave. The skies are empty. The fort’s gate has been wrenched from their hinges. He needs no further prompting. 

Niikolais blinks forward, his ears ringing with the whine of shattered timespace, and when he punches back into reality at a full pelt, the whine doesn’t fade, but instead transforms incomprehensibly into a steady, drumming wail at his back, rushing up to overtake them.

The recruits hear it, too. “Oh, sweet Dwayna. Here they come!”

All paths, ahead and behind, burst open. Fleeing Pact soldiers and a pursuing Mordrem horde, magic and ivy and thorns and bodies and weapons and screams. If Red Rock had been a flood, then this is a tide akin to a second rising of Orr.

He can barely breathe through the sand in his throat. 

He can barely see through the sand kicking up into his eyes. 

But he can _feel_ the distance they’d thought they had over the Mordrem steadily closing.

To his right, Medea leaps onto the back of an ersatz colocal and severs its spinal cord. Its limbs collapse beneath and she uses the momentum it had already had to boost herself towards the narrowing of the passage ahead. Niikolais spots the glimmer of her dagger lying broken in the sand as he follows her.

“Get to Sandfall!” she bays, spinning to plant her feet wide, pistol drawn. “Hold there with Osa!”

Far to the east, a distant and mournful horn trumpets out what he knows must be Red Rock’s fall. And the realization hits him with a horrible pang that the other strongholds may soon do the same.

There’s no choice to the matter. If they lose the southwest camp, they lose their sole line of support or retreat for those still alive in the jungle. Stumbling, Niikolais draws a line in the air and summons a breach of otherworldly speed to bear him away from the fight. 

Medea’s unforgiving eyes track him as he passes. They brim with distaste but amidst all the rest, he can’t find it in him to care what she thinks.

Onwards, she said. So onwards he’ll go.

He hasn’t checked whether the others are following behind or have even managed to outpace the Mordrem. Without magic, he’s no faster than an average human, but they possess more loyalty to Medea than he does, and also wear far heavier armour. 

Vaguely, as though he is piecing together a series of featureless clues, he recognizes the sound of Medea’s pistol going off, then gulps down the acrid smell of a gunpowder shot that will obscure the way to anyone not already past the choke.

Close, now. The southern route to Sandfall is a nightmare, notorious for the ceaseless cascade of sand that pours into the gorge from somewhere above. It’s by this landmark, he’s sure, that the stronghold got its name. He knows it makes transporting supply dolyaks a frustrating task—and right now, nearly impossible for a sylvari to scale at a run.

Niikolais keeps going. Sometimes sinking up to his knees, sometimes on all fours, when he has to pull himself free of a sandy undertow. Mordrem vines have infested what he can see of the bulwark ahead, ripping the siege weaponry and the walls apart, but a brassy voice that could be nothing other than norn cries out from within.

“I won’t go down so easily! Tear them back!”

His legs feel jelly-like, like seaweed. An insane part of him exhaustedly flirts with the urge to lay down there in the dunes. The drag on his ankles makes resisting that urge feel more and more like torture, until the moment the ground beneath his feet levels out again and he bursts through the guard’s-gate, directly into the throes of insanity. 

Hopping a sweep from a vine that has sprouted through a crack in the foundations, Niikolais slams a field of energy directly atop the tallest woman he can see. The norn, he hopes. Ossa, he hopes. Ghostly violet light coalesces about her and shills off her warhammer as she slams it into a Mordrem troll’s temple.

At the same time, a far shriller voice yells, “Tar incoming!” from the escarpments.

The Mordrem cook alive. They bray and they wilt and they pile up against a half-splintered gate. Niikolais plucks at the places where Tyria and the Mists overlap so he can rips the boons from those that remain.

But he has spent more time in the queen’s halls than he has among soldiers, and so, dizzy with adrenaline and the rancid smell, he realizes only once the fort falls hauntingly still that there will be consequences for what he’s done.

A rogue sylvari throwing themselves into the fray. What will that look like?

Abreast a sea of strung-out soldiers, the thought comes too late. He raises one hand in surrender, but a charr swings his great, gauntleted arm and nearly knocks him off his feet with the flat of his blade. Stumbling forward, Niikolais squeezes his arm where it caught the blow.

“Drop your weapons,” the charr growls. “Everyone put ‘em down before one of us ends up cutting off something important.”

“All I have is a rapier.” He takes a shallow breath and tries a diplomatic smile. “Given the circumstances, I would much prefer to keep it on me.”

All of Tyria’s orders had conscripted to the battle of the Silverwastes. Their regalia now are all like shades of red and green, and the faces staring at him hold even less love than Medea’s. And because he has refused to surrender his blade, so do theirs remain trained on him.

“What happened to the sylvari who were stationed here?” he asks, and this comes out sharpish. Whatever the answer he receives, it won’t be— _cannot be_ —good enough.

Perhaps they realize that. Perhaps that is why they give him their silence instead. He feels like a fly on the wall while everyone trades their uneasy glances, like he isn’t even a living, thinking being.

The warmaster had not trusted him.

 _Act with wisdom,_ he urges himself, as he stands noble and pressed in on by a dozen steely gazes. They haven’t yet upgraded to pressing on him with their blades, but he can’t help but feel like they are simply waiting to see if he gives them a reason to.

Finally, he speaks up again, more tepidly. “I would advise that everyone understand I have just held with you against a Mordrem attack. I am clearly here as an ally.”

She had not trusted him. That’s why she let him go, and that’s why he is alone here now.

Lightbringer Ossa, who towers high enough to blot out the sun, crosses her arms. “I advise you surrender your weapons as asked,” she says. “We will make sure you are safely escorted back to Camp Resolve.”

“You can’t,” Niikolais informs her— _informs_ her. He leaves no room in his diction for shirking around some point of contention. Facts are all that he can rely on for the lack of a jury of his peers. “Red Rock and Indigo Cave have both fallen. Medea secured the choke and sent her recruits, myself included, ahead—yet I alone am currently present. Sandfall is on the brink of ruin. You cannot afford to spare your men on the useless task of returning me to the base camp.”

_Act with wisdom._

“It ain’t personal.” Another war-torn charr. “We’ve had a few survivors make it back to us from the jungle and they all say the sylvari belong to the dragon now. We can’t afford to take any more chances on you. The Pact is struggling enough as it is.”

“But you allowed the commander through, didn’t you? Or have you also locked him up?”

The faces that aren’t hidden by visors or hoods have the grace to look discomfit. Valthika has won their loyalty enough that the remnants still cling on—but for how long?

“The commander understands that we will do whatever we consider to be necessary.”

He can barely believe his ears. “What you consider to be necessary? What you consider to be necessary?”

“As we’ve said,” says a trembling asura, “all sylvari have been compromised. We cannot ignore the potential inevitability of the commander’s mind simply because he is the commander.”

 _Act with wisdom._ He repeats it with more emphasis, turns it into a mantra in his head. _Act with wisdom, act with wisdom, act with wisdom—but, by the Tree, you still have to bloody well act!_

“Then I’m sorry,” he says at last, trembling also, and frantically alight, “but what you wish to do will make me into no better than a pawn for the dragon; one that sits idle in a cage until I trick and twist myself free and do whatever it is you think I mean to do to you now.”

He lifts a hand.

“Ossa, stop him—” the asura squeaks, but he steps forward and into the umbral dark seeping between his feet, and vanishes. 

The sound of brandished metal slips down his spine like it means to be a physical touch, but Niikolais ducks through staggered soldiers and through the hole in the broken gate before anyone has the chance to touch him and break the spell.

Then he is free, invisible and yet feeling utterly naked, panting in the desert heat.

The tenants on which they built their society; his determination to attack the jungle with tactics, with backup, with coordination; all known constants; allies; the best laid plans… they have all become as ephemeral as a dream.

Niikolais presses his back to the stone wall. Touches his brow, his throat, the place where he would carry a beating heart, and finally looks towards the chasm to the west. 

The way is open, and—for a time—clear.

Until these days of Tyrian reckoning, the Pale Tree protected them all. She’d been misguided, perhaps, in keeping mum on the origins of the sylvari’s making. That much seems true; he thinks he sees that now. 

But he feels no doubt that she must have done so out of her love for each and every one of them, knowing that she had to starve the weed if their hearts were ever find the freedom to grow beautiful and just.

Ephemeral, yes, but to let go of what remains would be a cruelty worse than corruption. The duty now lays with him and all his kind to repay the kindness and strength their mother has always shown. If not for her, then for the sake of world which had, in turn, nurtured her.

Honour, Niikolais is coming to realize, could come with no worthier price than one’s life. 

And so, embraced by shadow, he drinks deep his final moments of free air and plunges forward into the dragon’s domain.

——————————————

The first bite takes him in the thigh. Besides the instant bloom of pain and sap in a perfect semi-circle, it’s the speed which knocks him breathless. Nothing natural has ever moved so fast as the Mordrem do.

Its body is small, whatever it is; hunched like a puppet on a string, and the flesh completely rotted away from its face, leaving twin ghostlights to burn in the empty sockets. An odorous flower engulfs the skull like a mane, its petals dotted with black specks of rot.

And it had leapt at him from behind, ripping him from stealth like it the eldritch meant nothing. Like it had seen right through it.

Biting back a reedy gasp, Niikolais twists to deny it its flanking maneuver. Yet it jolts to the left when he turns right, and comes in like a flare of lightning, crunching its jaws closed around the same thigh. 

It springs back from his downward cut, and as it circles him in search of a third opening, he gets his first decent look. A wolf—well, the corpse of one. There had been more of these in the Silverwastes, only smaller. They had ripped a pack dolyak apart. They had ripped armoured soldiers apart.

“Oh… What in Tyria…”

This time he catches it mid-leap, pushing his weight forward in a riposte that knocks the creature flying backwards up the incline. But it possesses speed he simply doesn’t have. It finds its feet again as quickly as he can bring his elbow back in and lunges open-mouthed from higher ground.

Niikolais’ better instincts leave him. “Blight—” 

Falling to one knee, he raises his blade, and in the moment that it occurs to brace his wrist with his off hand, the wolf swallows the sword and impales itself. 

The hellish pits of its eyes snuff out like a candle’s flame, leaving Niikolais staring up into the roiling, open mass of vines that makes the maw. Blood oozes up his wrist towards the elbow, thick as tar. Slowly it eats through the leather bracer.

He unlocks his arm and mechanically draws it back, dislodging his blade from the thing’s throat. It collapses at his feet, still writhing, but completely dead. He’s sure of it. As if to settle the matter, a swarm of bloated blackflies erupt from its corpse and disperse sluggishly on the air. Niikolais recoils a step, covers his mouth until he’s sure they won’t descend upon him next.

Then he drops his sword into its sheath and scrambles to unbuckle his bracer. Betime it hits the ground, tiny holes have already begun to dissolve through the outermost layer of his arm. He rubs them wearily. “Ah. Mulch.” 

This is the way of the Maguuma Wastes, then.

Everything that is alive connects back to the dragon. 

Indeed, everything dead, as well. 

The fibrous vines threading the creature’s spine are already taking root wherever they touch the earth. As though the jungle itself is aware of where every slain Mordrem lay, even those that should now be completely divorced from all sentience. Within moments it would easily become indistinguishable from the rest of the jungle—if not for the overwhelming reek of decay and rotted meat.

If not for the sightless eyes, still staring.

Niikolais plants his heel atop its skull and bears down. 

It cracks too cleanly to belong to a newly-made corpse. The bone is brittle and sun-bleached. When he withdraws his foot, he feels his stomach turn at the black mass writhing inside the skull in the full midafternoon sun. Insects, rot, deliquescing viscera. 

This is an old corpse. This is a corpse that has forgotten what it was like to have organs and meat.

Gritting his teeth, he turns away. Squeezes a hand around his oozing thigh. Until he can see it properly cleaned and bandaged, a thaumaturgic film will have to do. It has made do before. 

For now, he limps towards the crater of airship parts, gingerly testing the weight his leg can take. Engines and propellers in their dying throes screech somewhere beyond the crest of the next hill, though the death of the Pact carpets the entire landscape. 

Copters still smoking and rent. The jungle floor littered with supplies scattered by the same explosions that had first downed the ships. But there are no bodies, despite the rampant destruction, and that realization leaves him with a sickness unlike any other. 

To walk through so much feels utterly hopeless, and he feels utterly alone for the first time in his life.

Eventually, there’s nothing left but to follow the faraway wail. 

It leads him down into a pockmarked plain, where Niikolais slows to a creep. Listening does him little good when the air is polluted by still-burning fires and groaning metal, and beneath that, the ambient chitters of a jungle that has come wholly alive. So instead he watches, chin jerking birdlike at every movement, and slips between dislocated airship walls.

Finally, behind a perilous mesa to the west, something moves, but not in the way that a human moves. Too large, too… serpentine. He falls into a crouch and leans far to the side, but before he can make up his mind, another movement happens far closer to his left.

In the shade of a suspended Pact chopper, three Mordrem wolves rise and shake themselves, turning as one towards his crouching place. Niikolais can see their maws dripping gore even from a distance, torn from what he fears to be a distinctly charr-like corpse.

The largest among them flattens low to the ground and charges. 

“Not this time,” he sighs, stumbling backwards to his feet, but nevertheless it nearly reaches him before he finds a seam in reality large enough to bear him.

A second Niikolais catches the wolf’s lunge with its spectral arm.

The second and third wolves close in from either side, but again he’s elsewhere, his breathless laugh quickly fading. In the glimpses he can scavenge between blinks, he spots a distant group fighting tooth and claw against some monstrous creature that has breached forth from the parched earth.

Surely that thing has to be the source of the ghostly wail whistling through the brink, not the remnants of an already-destroyed fleet. It is the esoteric scream of something not properly alive to know how screams should sound.

He shatters the shuddering Niikolais that has nearly splintered apart in the Mordrem’s jaws. It bites through nothing where there had been something just a moment ago, so tangible it had been sure it was about to taste blood. Before it can react, a new, heartier him springs forward from the side and punches its rapier between rotting ribs.

The Mordrem, convulsing, looses a howl like no wolf of sanity’s creation. Tormented by the trickery Niikolais is playing, even if it cannot comprehend it.

The figures on the hill swarm the breacher like ants.

A hot gust of breath to his left. Niikolais channels his focus and swaps places with himself, feeling a wash of grim relief when the illusion’s arm shatters between Mordrem teeth in lieu of his own. He withdraws his slickened blade from where the clone had buried it in a tangled ribcage and gashed across a naked spine.

With each deception, the wolves’ savagery grows. He twists on skidding heels, half-deafened by crystalline explosions and a truly bestial, ceaseless keening that circles him like an auditory monster moving in for the kill. A mistimed riposte nearly rips the blade from his hands.

He shatters again, ignoring the pain and exhaustion etched across his own copies’ faces as they fall apart. The trick behind phantasms is that they will never stop coming back to deceive anew—not so long as the mesmer has the strength to will it so. But unlike the beasts of mortal creation, or the risen corpses under Zhaitan’s control, or Niikolais himself, the Mordrem wolves don’t tire.

They keep on relentlessly until the moment they die.

Of course, he thinks, planting a boot against a wolf’s brittle ribcage and shoving hard. Of course.

It staggers back, and another goes for his leg, and as he recoils to evade the open jaws, he falls. He isn’t sure what happens in the instant he lands on his back, because the next thing he’s aware of is his hand wrapped around the Mordrem’s spine through the wet meat of its thoracic cavity, keeping it at bay. He doesn’t remember doing this.

And its skull hangs over him like a Nightmare. Pungent stamens loll through a hole in its cheek, the mockery of a tongue, its broken teeth gnashing the air above his cheek, and Niikolais’ elbow groans in warning as he forces it to remain unbent under the force the wolf bears down upon him with. 

In his peripheral, he sees himself brought to his knees, the vines which run up the backs of his copy’s legs severed by lycan teeth.

He has to get back up.

No; he _must_ get back up, or he will die like this. At most, the phantasm can endure a few seconds more before it gives to the strain and the wolves descend upon him wholly. So—right now. He has to get back up now.

Sylvari have no pulse and yet something beats in him now: fear. 

The spine twists in his fingers, alive in a way separate from the whole of the beast. Niikolais squeezes harder. This isn’t a vine that will die if strangled tightly enough, a part of him says. Quiet, he tells it.

Indeed, that’s all he does before the illusion collapse and the other Mordrem howl, that terrible, artificial skirl of air passing through skeletal remains. Niikolais stares up into a maw split so wide it seems to be grinning at him, as if to say, _Well; too late now._

Beating in him like a wardrum. 

Boom, boom, boom. 

His mouth opens in a low scream. _Please, Mother, don’t forsake me._ He jerks his arm—warping under the pressure—to the side and prays he throws the Mordrem into the pack and buys himself even a moment’s more time. Yet his fingers haven’t even left the spine before a darkness comes over him, at the crescendo of that terrible rhythm.

Boom, boom, boo—

An inexorable blow takes the wolf in the side like a bull minotaur’s charge. He feels his arm nearly pop from its socket.

The wolf disappears over the cliff, to be consumed by the jungle once more, and the great, dark shape that had hit it bounds past him and crashes down on the remaining pack. Niikolais regards his own trembling hand for a moment, still closed around a fragment of the creature’s spine, then surges to his feet.

He can tell at second glance that the figure is a bear, though it stands a dozen feet tall and on bipedal legs, as only a shifted norn can do. Phantasmal images of himself flank it on either side. These it ignores as it comes down hard on its forepaws, shaking the earth with the same cadence that had shaken his limbs.

With an awful wrench of its head, it shatters through bone and tosses the next wolf aside. He watches it land in a jittering heap and limp back to its feet only for a second, and far smaller, creature to come darting from the underbrush, close to the ground, and set into it with an awful yowling.

“Su—?” The animals spit and hiss and gibber and wrestle too fast for him to follow. “ _Jyte?_ ”

The were-bear pays him no more mind than it would a fly. It plucks the third wolf off as it latches onto its flank, and in its massive paws, it rends the skull to the left and its haunches to the right, stretching sinew and vine to their thinnest point before the force rips them in two. 

Another Mordrem dead, its open jaws chattering in a hideous facsimile of a laugh.

Niikolais looks between the blur of teeth and claw at his back and the great, black shape before him. Maybe he’s wrong. Almost certainly he could be wrong. Its eyes are more animal than norn; intelligent but unchained. If there truly is a conscious mind in there, it exists beneath a blind and berserking rage he has only ever heard about. 

He tries again: “Jyte!”

It roars at that, and he tenses, but it charges the cliff, not him, and from the ursan form, Jyte shakes out, sweat-slick and wrathful. Somewhere between herself and beast, she skids to a stop at the lip and hurls the bisected Mordrem over, baring her seething teeth at the abyss.

“How dare you defile Wolf’s image like this,” Jyte snarls, quickly becoming a bellow. “The dragons will pay for the mockery they make of his pack! My people will rip the jungle apart! We’ve already killed the dragon of _death_ —what more is left to fear?”

She drags her breaths like a tested boar. The jungle does not deign to answer her. 

Behind him, there’s an awful crunch and a whimper, then nothing. He realizes the screech from earlier has been silenced; the breacher now lies still and coiled on the crest, while the victors stand vigil and cut its corpse apart.

Suvi comes to stand nearby—because the bobcat could be no one else, if the were-bear were Jyte—her muzzle stained with blood and sap. He crouches down and haltingly extends a hand towards her, feeling the warning growl rumble through her even though she allows him to rest it on her scruff. As with master, so too with pet.

“Jyte.” Niikolais tries for a third time, and like the saying goes, she finally spins his way. 

“Branchling.” The enraged mantle she wears slips from her shoulders. She takes a knee before him and leans down so he can wrap his arms about her neck in embrace. Her muscles are as tightly wound as an asuran springbox. 

“It is good to see you here,” she says into his ear. “And thank Bear that I came across you when I did. Fortune favours you.”

Niikolais allows himself to close his eyes and relish a moment’s respite, the last of his illusions breaking away without a foe for them to engage.

“You could tell it was me?”

Her massive arms fold about him, crushing him into her embrace. Likely she thinks him a silly creature for needing to ask, but in his eyes, the norn have proven themselves quite capable of things no other race can boast.

“No,” she admits freely, and releases him. “I heard these ‘wolves’ howling and wished to impart my own feelings on the matter.”

“I’d wondered how Trygg could reach me so swiftly.”

Nodding, Jyte gestures towards the figures on the hill. “We broke through the Mordrem cutting off passage into the Silverwastes. Your commander brother and his friends had already passed through here by that time.”

“He had?” He feels a stab of concern and holds onto it. “Where is he now? Who is ‘we’?” 

“Kelda and Sergey, and Berit.” Jyte gestures back towards the north, opposite of the direction he’d come. “The weedling… trying to make sense of these jungle frogs.” 

A dozen hands pull on him from every direction. “Kelda is here?” No, all that he knows of the norn has painted that woman in this way. Headstrong, fearless, hungry to meet her match. “Pardon me, never mind that; we can speak on it in safer quarters. For now, can you take me to Valthika? —Jungle frogs?”

“Like the hylek, but distant kin more than brothers. I know the way to their village. Come, quickly. Until you get a glider, it is the jungle path for us.”

She places two fingers to her lips and whistles to the norn on the hill. Niikolais winces at her booming voice: “The trophy is yours today, Sergey! You may pitch the camp in exchange!” Though he has to squint, he can see the tallest of the three mock at a bow. Jyte laughs at that, the sweetest sound he will hear for many weeks to come.

——————————————

Niikolais has no pliancy. Not in his personality, spirits help her! but least of all in his shape. Once it may have served him well, when need was that he cut his foes with a sharp tongue and not a blade. Neither tongue nor blade alone will save him here.

The Pact has been broken. Dashed across this sprawling jungle like a jotun dashes heads on the rocks. She’s barely lent it any thought since stepping into the brink. That’s fine; she never took up its banner and she doesn’t need its permission to act. 

No; it had been a dream that had made its way into the waking world, and had lasted for a while, for far longer than she was sure it would, at first—but most things that come together in war will eventually have to part again. 

Her kin have had no choice but to live by that belief. 

After the slaying of the Great Destroyer, tales say the norn tried to remain a unified people, as humans were, but they could not live against their nature for long. When the seasons changed, their hunts migrated across the marches, and they had returned to their old ways, their forever ways, and thus that chapter of norn history had closed with no sense of shame. 

Then, when Jormag awoke and ravaged the far Shiverpeaks and their minds with its corruption, they had surrendered their homelands in exchange for their lives and followed Asgeir south. There they will remain until they retake their forsaken home or die.

A day might come yet, in a future that exists beyond this jungle, where the strongest of what remains will come together and rally them behind the banner once again. 

So Jyte does not fault the Pact for its rise and fall.

What she cannot stand is seeing it descend upon itself as though all this time it has been starving after its own blood, and the moment it could start it flowing, had lost all better instinct not to. 

All the worse, for each hollow stare she’s seen and grim comment she’s heard shared in an undertone, Jyte fears that it has discovered a taste for it. It fills her heart with sorrow and shame, shame that they don’t even know to feel for themselves.

This place is going to bleed them all dry. 

Being here does things to their heads, but not in same the way it does to the sylvari—in a way that subjects those of weaker will to paranoia, and eventually to turning knife blades on their former allies. She has already heard the sentiment that the jungle itself conspires to kill them, and she can’t shake the feeling that this time, it’s as sure a thing as Wolf’s teeth are sharp.

She doesn’t sleep. She takes her time here in moments of half-slumber, always a hand pressed into Suvi’s ruff, as hunters rest when they’re in pursuit of particularly dangerous prey. A minotaur. A Svanir scouting party. 

Never the land itself. But it had once been ‘never the Icebrood’, ‘never the Svanir’, ‘never the Destroyers’, so she welcomes a new challenge the likes of which the norn have never faced. It will keep her mind sharp and her blade sharper.

And indeed it does. Felling creatures of bark and sap sounds hardly different from felling a tree for kindling, and out here, there are far more creatures whose only purpose is to lay waste than there are axes made to gather kindling. The single, truest difference is that sylvari cry out.

Sylvari cry. 

Soon, she will come to instinctively seek out a foe to conquer whenever she hears that sound: metal cutting wood. Heedless of circumstance, whether or not she knows there to be foes about, even though Niikolais’ misdirections are clever enough to trick her in the heat of battle, and trick his enemies far better. Even though she knows the jungle will take much more from them both before it’s through.

Soon, Jyte will learn to listen for the dull sounds of his pain as easily as she does the Spirits of the Wild, and learn, too, that sylvari, despite their love for all things, are the hollowest of all plants, with room enough inside them for veins and lifesblood and a heart.

Soon. It will be very soon, now.

——————————————

He is poring over maps and logbooks when it happens. A sickening upside-down feeling as though his stomach, his soul, his brain, have all surged up into his skull and begun pouring out through his eyes. 

Niikolais barely has the presence of mind to shove back from the table before he collapses onto it. The candle’s flame flickers dangerously and he’s unable to tell whether it does because his vision has begun to swim, or the table scraping across the central camp’s hard-packed floor.

**Submit to me.**

His fingers are brittle, pressed to his face. They have never felt like this before, like splintered wood with no life or reason left to them but as fuel to a forest fire.

**Obey.**

The _true_ , focused call of an Elder Dragon. That’s what this is. Mordremoth has found him among all other living things that have set foot into its domain and reached for him.

An oppressive weight bears down on him, as though Jyte had wrapped him in her great hands and squeezed. It’d be better to sooner drown in his own lungs than in his own mind, but the jungle has other plans for him tonight.

“Ambassador?” 

He turns to see an asura standing at the entrance to the tent, wearing full Vigil gear and a guarded expression. When Niikolais fails to speak in any sort of recognition of him, he adds, “Crusader Tekk, sir,” and moves a step closer.

This isn’t the first time he’s heard the name and title. He knows it isn’t. He touches a hand to his temple, following a clouded map of other names: if anywhere, he would have heard from Valthika, who now divides much of his time among the remaining Pact strategists.

Shashoo, Neary, Laranthir of the Wild, and the Vigil tactician Hafwen, once of Vigil fame—whose second-in-command might have indeed been an asura who goes by Tekk. 

But from what he’d been able to gather from fireside chatter, Hafwen had gone to join Laranthir and the Pale Reavers in the shrouded ruins to the southeast. Left by night, left a note. Whatever the reason or method of departure, her men should have made the transfer with her.

“It’s nothing, soldier,” he says wanly. “I mistook the shadows for a Mordrem lurking outside the tent.”

If the Pale Mother still smiles upon him even here, it will sound less pained to Tekk’s ears. He’d once heard it told that pain did not bother the asura the way it did others. But Tekk makes him wonder. He doesn’t seem to have heard that rumour.

His hand rests upon his hilt, he notices, as though he thinks he might be able to threaten the dragon from his mind.

(Or perhaps—)

Tekk looks in the direction he had gestured. “I’ll perform a perimeter check,” he offers, but sounds unconvinced.

With painstaking care, Niikolais makes himself uncoil one joint at a time. He feels an angry ache in the grain of his very self. Pushing harder when he pushes back, mocking him, a voiceless warning that so long as he fights this, it’ll simply work harder to snap him like a tree before a hurricane. 

“No; it was merely a trick of my mind. Please, return to your duties. We haven’t much time left before Mordremoth stages another assault.”

A new branch to the one already waging against sylvari will.

The dragon had been a name, a concept, but now it’s not imminent; it’s here. It has found him at last and let loose a boiling storm inside his mind, crashing on the edges of his consciousness before building back on itself, like waves breaking on the shore. The language is not one he knows, and yet he knows it: **Serve your purpose,** it says, **and know peace.**

Already, he can barely hear his own thoughts or the insects or the jungle rumbling and alive beneath their very feet. Just the dragon feeling along the edges of his identity. _Singing_ to him.

“—mission to speak freely, ambassador.”

And… Tekk. Somehow, he can still hear Tekk.

He winces and splays his hand over his face, up through heat-strangled hair. “We’re well beyond political ranks here, crusader, but permission granted. Speak quickly.”

“Of course,” says Tekk briskly, followed by, “Do you think you’re being clever? Sir.”

The candlelight is barely enough to illuminate Tekk’s face. Three hundred years have passed since the asura were driven from the depths, well below the places the sun could touch, and their eyes have not yet lost that gleam in the lowlight. Mordrem eyes do the same. Niikolais resists the urge to look away.

“Perhaps I should have said _speak carefully,_ ” he replies, in a voice gone tauter than a bowstring. He possesses the grace yet, at least, to first attempt a verbal parry—perhaps, hopefully, delaying the descent into bladework that’s sure to come.

But like all asura, Tekk looks adversity in the face and speaks to it with a tremendous amount of confidence. “Ambassador, I know what I saw. My commanding officer was in the same way the night she departed for Laranthir’s camp.” He steps forward again. “You’ve heard it, haven’t you—? Mordremoth.”

Niikolais’ shoulders creak in an awful way. 

Outside, the camp continues to debate which surviving Vigil officer should direct them, as it has for several hours already. There had been contention among the ranks at first, and for a while, one voice had become indistinguishable from the other. Now that the sun nears the horizon, it has quietened to terse, harried murmurs, making it more than likely that someone could overhear this conversation. Especially if—

He strides past Tekk and draws the tent flap shut with an unsteady hand. 

“I _hear_ it, we all _hear_ it. That does not mean we are bound to do as it says!”

Tekk removes his helmet and tucks it beneath an arm. Something has torn his left ear, recently, and it still bleeds gently down the side of his face. 

“I understand, sir,” he says. He seems unperturbed by the vehemence with which Niikolais spoke. “Understand that the Pact recruits speak only for themselves when they call the sylvari a liability. We all knew the risk we were taking on dragon corruption when we took the fight to Zhaitan.”

 _Zhaitan,_ Niikolais thinks, unable to stifle the chagrin. The shadow dragon that had made servants out of those already dead. Not so long ago, that had seemed so dire. Humans had begun burning their deceased, hoping to spare them its influence, and Firstborn Trahearne had looked at the sylvari, who could not be touched, and formed an armada that could fight and fall to the dragon’s numbers but never add to them.

Now Tyria knows precisely what it was that had spared the sylvari the same ends that befell all the others. They had been reserved for a different fate.

“I can personally assure you of that, ambassador.” The asura soldier stands a little taller. Niikolais would still have to crouch to look him in the eye. “Those of us who were there, and who saw our allies return as part of Zhaitan’s army, know we cannot afford to view this through a different lens.”

It _is_ different. He wishes anyone in this jungle who wasn’t sylvari could understand why without twisting it into still more reason to treat them as pariahs. 

Zhaitan had merely puppeted corpses. Mordremoth is in their minds, inverting their sense of self while they still live, and the call comes from within, where its lure is inescapable. But where the Risen were mindless, the sylvari have no choice but to endure it, or else they will live out the rest of their days watching their own hands enact the dragon’s will.

They don’t have the same perverted luxury that everyone else had, of knowing they will at least die as themselves.

Niikolais seethes gently. “Those recruits may speak only for themselves,” he concedes, “but they are still abducting sylvari _from this very camp_ to deal out their idea of justice, and no one has drawn enough contention with this to stop them.” 

Betrayal stings anew, the healing bark pulled back from Riannoc’s wound.

“Precisely my point,” Tekk says grimly. “My squad had a sylvari in acting command when Mordremoth destroyed the fleet. She’s one of our sharpest tacticians, has been with us since well before the assault on Orr. But she heard the dragon speaking to her as soon as we crashed in the jungle. I met with her before anyone else knew and helped her get to Laranthir’s detachment, where she’ll be safer among the Reavers. I…” 

Now Tekk’s prominent brow furrows, reflecting a hesitance uncharacteristic to the asura, and he doesn’t finish the thought. Instead, he reaches up and pats Niikolais’ limp hand in an even rarer display of sympathy. 

“Give things time to settle, sir, and you’ll find that most of us aren’t so quick to turn on our friends when we have a jungle dragon to kill. But until then, if I were you, I’d be careful who I let my guard down around.”

Time, he thinks, is the last thing he wants to give the jungle dragon.

“You have my word, Crusader,” he says, consonants leaded, “that I’ve no intention of letting it down at all. For anyone.”

“Remember that conviction. You’ll need it.” Tekk scratches his cheek with a taloned hand, sounding uneasy. “Now that that’s out of the way. If anyone asks me—which, mind you, is an infinitesimal possibility given present circumstances—my report will be as follows: I thought I heard a commotion within the compound and came to investigate. However, I discovered nothing amiss, and concluded the jungle must be making me jumpy. Additionally, tight rationing has likely contributed to an adverse effect on my cerebral functions and reasoning capabilities. After reminding you that we expect Mordremoth’s vines will scout this location after sundown, I took my leave.”

Niikolais’ heads swims. Everything’s gotten so quiet, he realizes, like the pale and sickly silence that lies beneath a thunderstorm. The debate has finished. He closes his eyes, nodding, cool relief followed by a very real and gripping fear of that silence and what it could mean if anyone outside has been standing too near the tent. People for whom the thunder never even came.

The world will hear it all. In time.

“And so,” Tekk continues, “I’ll take my leave.”

He pulls the Pact helm down over his ears again and turns to open the tent flap with the back of an arm. Then he pauses, back to him, hand once more coming to rest upon his pommel. Niikolais still can’t fathom for how many reasons that might be this time. 

“But… ambassador? If you really are determined to set up here, I would recommend finding someone you trust to keep you company.” Tekk’s lambent eyes gleam at him in the dark. “Someone big. I hate to be realistic when what we need a miracle, but my report won’t change a thing if someone above my rank gets suspicious and decides to capitalize on the situation. Besides, I’m only stationed here as long as it takes for— ahhh… Doctor Elly to approve my transfer to Laranthir’s camp.”

He’s going to die, Niikolais thinks bleakly, watching him disappear ‘round a bend in the camp. Everything will.

And so it churns.

——————————————

Niikolais has barely crossed the threshold when he spots her: Jyte’s great shape halfway to the top of the outcropping the asura technicians have decided will shelter a waypoint, eventually. She is one of few present not garbed in Pact attire, though she has purloined a new set of bracers.

She crouches, flanked by Suvi, one palm flat to the stone, her hair lifted from her brow by a suffocating breeze. Unaware of his gaze—perhaps unaware of anything but what she’s set out to find.

“Jyte, a moment?”

Golden-grey eyes flash towards him. She leans forward a touch and calls down to him, “A Mordrem scouting party is to the north.”

The camp sits in a gulley that scrapes towards the sky on all sides before plunging into the depths, making scouting a nigh-impossible task for all but the Mordrem. Their one advantage is that the position is defensible—to a point. Surviving the night is the one thing that matters anymore.

“You’ve seen them?”

“No,” she says, dropping from the ledge as though it were little more than a step. “I smell them. They’re upwind. If their target is the central camp, we’ll know by dark, as the Vigil thought.”

The light has begun to purple and fade. It won’t be long. Niikolais places his itching fingers in his pockets where they’ll do less harm.

“We should talk quickly, then.” He can’t be sure he won’t lose his nerve unless he confesses before the dragon can convince him he never meant to. “Somewhere private.”

Jyte looks at him in some kind of understanding and slings an arm about his shoulder, perfectly companionable, as nearby soldiers level them with empty stares. “The jungle has eyes, but we’ll give it a show, won’t we?”

The others watch them go. Niikolais feels their gazes tracking him as he slips past the scrap barricades. They trust Jyte, who is as eager as any norn to sink her teeth into Mordremoth’s belly—it’s him that they aren’t so sure of. 

He hopes that their faith in the Commander is more steadfast than their faith in him. Valthika may crumple beneath the weight of this, otherwise. His brother’s will is strong but strained. 

Once the camp’s drone drowns in jungle ambience, Jyte removes her arm and leans back against the rock, arms crossed. Expectant. The words stick behind his teeth.

“It—spoke to me.” Niikolais flexes his fingers around an invisible vine. The one he’s pretending belongs to Mordremoth, and that if he squeezes tight enough, it’ll break apart and come loose from his throat. “The dragon. When we first made it to the central camp.”

Jyte’s attention is wholly on him in an instant. Heavy, pressing from the outside so that he feels suffocated between two opposing forces. “What has it been saying?”

“Nothing.” He furrows his brow, changes tack. “Nothing worth repeating.”

But that doesn’t satisfy her. Historically, very little here has. “Branchling. I am no human. You won’t offend me by speaking the truth.”

Grimacing, Niikolais turns his face towards the cliffs. Offense worries him the least of all the things the truth might do to her. To him. 

“Like the Dream, the dragon calls for me to listen. ‘Serve me’, ‘obey’… feelings like those, spoken in my own voice. It isn’t clever, yet, simply overpowering. Just a poison.”

“Feeble poisons will still do the trick if they sit in the blood for long enough.”

Her broad hands envelope his face and tip it upwards. As he curls his fingers around her good wrist, lightning-quick, he catches a whiff of the cinnamon bark she’s always chewing on. His lungs coat in it. Whether or not Jyte expected resistance, he cannot for the life of the Pale Mother discern, because she completes the motion regardless.

She moves into his space until it’s just as much her own.

“But you’re still you in there, aren’t you, branchling,” she says, a question turned declaration midway through the saying, in a voice reserved for open defiance to the contrary. “Fighting a great battle against tangled dragon and thorn... Wolf’s teeth, I can’t strive to imagine it.”

“You don’t have to.”

“But I will. I will! Why should you fight it alone?”

He tries to pry her loose, gentle in grip and firm in tone. “Jyte. I beg of you, have faith in me of this one thing. I know it is too hot here, too caged, there isn’t enough wind—but so long as this jungle chokes us, what glaciers exist here have no place to go about melting. Not here; never here.”

He has seen ice shear away from the mountains of the norn. He has seen how tremendous the destruction can be; the deafening crack that splits the air seconds before ice crashes onto the valleys below and shatters like glass into a thousand pieces more. Sometimes that is exactly as nature intended it to happen, and other times it is because the dragon’s call is too overwhelming not to calve under.

Jyte is calving now, fracturing away from herself—which, together with the voice sawing through mind, is far more than he’d been prepared to have to keep grips on.

The seams of his soul cry out for reprieve.

“Jyte—”

_I need you to not stray far from me._

Jyte gives him only the time to say her name before she presses her lips to his temple. It feels like fire. She says, “In here, isn’t it?” and grins like a starving drake. “Or has it sown its brambles somewhere harder to cut at, say— _here_?”

Dully, he feels her rap her knuckles on his chest. Touching him, concretely, though it feels like it comes from a hundred leagues away. Niikolais realizes he’s gone to grasp her other wrist, too.

“It’s—all those places, and everywhere.”

“Well. Someone ought to remind Brimstone how easy he has it.”

She spits out a laugh, as though that hadn’t been appalling of her to say, but Niikolais can only gaze at her in watery confusion. 

“I don’t suppose they would have told you, in case it happened that you’ve turned. ‘Tis said there is a dragon in the charr’s mind now, same as a dragon is in yours. These are strange times we find ourselves in, when everyone so quick to hunt your kind have nothing to say to that.”

This is the first that the coldness of her climate has ever seemed to touch her. Here, at the heart of everything foul, when they have never been further from Timberline’s snow-capped peaks. There is nothing of home here for either of them.

“Humans and asura became Risen. The Svanir worship Jormag and swarm the Lion Road from Hoelbrak to Gendarran. But we choose now to draw the line?” She’s nearly panting with her quiet fury. “Dragon minions, every one of them—it’s just a different dragon.” 

Tempering himself, but just barely, he says: “…Jyte,” and nothing else, because he can’t think of anything else that won’t turn this into a war. And the source of the urge to start one grips him by the arms, with calloused, nornish hands.

She is, after all, a whirlwind force of nature. 

“Ha! Yes,” she cries, “remember my name! Call it out when the night is dark, when heads are cleaved and battle is joined. I will come to your aid on Raven’s wings.”

A light has been set behind her eyes; she looks jubilant. She looks profoundly alive. 

“Mordremoth cannot have you, branchling. By the great northern wind, it may try, but I swear that it won’t.”

Jyte’s fingertips thrum with the pulse of her people. Niikolais can _feel_ it. They stamp their feet and they chant, preparing for war.

——————————————

v. auric basin

 

“The jungle is watching us,” he murmurs, catching sight of Jyte’s hand as it seizes at her side, then jerks to the back of her neck. This is the third time she’s done so since leaving Southwatch, and always as though she expects to find something alive clutching on to her there. “It knows we’re here. We walk upon the dragon’s spine.”

The air is so close and sweltering around them that she looks ill. Brow taut, lips thin, eyes narrowed. “What an arrogant place to put us,” she says, impressively disdainful. “I’ll break it in half with my own two hands.”

He would think this an empty threat if he hadn’t already seen her do so to many a Mordrem.

In all cardinal directions, the jungle creaks and buzzes and groans. Now and then, the canopy moves as though something large and invisible has pushed it aside to get a better look at the Pact scurrying down below. Beams of poisonous light cut through the dense foliage and roll across Niikolais’ shoulders in a way they couldn’t have before that unseen hand. He glances up and scans the crooked branches for a source of the movement. Jyte follows suit.

If there is something, it really is invisible.

He looks back to find Jyte watching him over her shoulder. Her eyes are dark and hollowed beneath. By the Tree, he wants to beg her to rest, but she will refuse to, has already refused to. It’s been hours of this, these fraught glances between them, and he’s sure her fingers would merely tighten further around her walking stick should he try to force them loose now.

“Stay near me, branchling,” she says, lifting her chin in general indication of the mystery presence.

They’ve little need these days for verbal warnings when a look communicates just as well and doesn’t risk that a cloaked Mordrem guard might overhear them, but he suspects she has developed an attachment to the nickname and hearing it spoken aloud.

He sows tenderness into his voice. “I’m here. Watch the path behind.”

The dragon’s voice has assured that he will never again consider himself better than the intangible.

She nods but gestures upwards with a gloved finger. “I think it’s the trees we should be watching for.”

“Together with the ground, the shadows, and the hollows,” Niikolais murmurs. Since coming to the basin, he has already tripped and fallen into one that contained a boar’s toxic corpse. Jyte had had to fish him out with her longbow.

“These tracks are hours old.” Jyte gestures to the sparse mix of southward prints. She leaves few of her own now that she’s learned the give of the soil. “Whatever it is travels by treetop.”

Whatever it is, if it isn’t the jungle itself making adjustments to keep them ever on the edge between discovery and ambush. This goes unsaid, but not unthought of. 

“We’ll take a little more care, but please do have Suvi mind the path behind. We’re too vulnerable otherwise.”

Jyte clicks her tongue twice and the wildcat heels to her side. Mordrem seem peculiarly capable of tracking any shrill noise: a humming waypoint, asuran weaponry, Exalted magics, a norn’s whistle to call her animal companion.

Slowly they wend towards the southern camp as Jyte has marked it upon her map. There are only half-measures here, and she’d sketched a loose outline of the basin with help an Exalted Sage. The two hadn’t been able to agree upon distance or time—not even as the crow flies—but in practice, it’s far better than blindly wandering down branching, verdant paths with only ‘south’ to go on. 

When they come across a discrepancy, they correct it using charcoal from Jyte’s belt. The paper chasm widens. Jyte pens in any new landmarks she sees fit; identifiable wreckage, fallen trees.

She draws a circle with three spikes on top and says, “Bristlebacks,” by way of explanation. “This one is for water. A circle above it means clean water, and a hatch through the circle means dirty water—”

She stops before he’s finished lifting a hand to shush her. 

There’s been a change in the breeze.

Sometimes Niikolais senses something that few others do, even when they stand astride, breathing the same air, feeling the same changes in its currents that he does. A twisting… weight, in his chest, that folds in on itself, instead of sinking down, a kaleidoscope that’s felt instead of seen. Every time it comes, it floods him with the thought that _something isn’t right,_ even if nothing he can see has gone wrong. _But it will,_ it tells him. _In just a moment, it will._

He is a mesmer, a manipulator; he makes people see things that aren’t there and makes them glance over the things that are. When his life was confined to ambassador’s work, it was just a parlor trick—a way to impress the more mulish have-to-knows passing through whichever city he was delegated to at the time.

Perhaps that’s where the feeling first took root. In parlor tricks. How is it that a mesmer can warp reality and yet never fall for his own tricks? Because they have looked further beyond the veil than those who use other magic—and once there’s a gap in that curtain, what’s beyond the veil is free to look back.

So he will see it.

And so it happens.

It happens now, with a mournful groan: an eye in Maguuma opens wide.

⸙⸙⸙

As Zhaitan before, so too does Mordremoth abandon the natural ways of the world.

There is a true and recondite horror in watching the land itself become a being that exists only within its own confines; what he believed to be overgrowth up to the very moment it moves suddenly meets his gaze and recognizes its own sentience, baring teeth like thorns on a rose stem. A creature of root, of vine, twisted and blighted and stinking of its own organic rot.

Before, there had been Mordrem wolves, husks, colocals, and trolls—all creatures Niikolais already knew, creatures of Tyrian creation that had been corrupted by dragon influence. The thing that leaps between them is something new. Mordremoth’s spite brought to life.

It rears five—no, ten;— _no_ ;—an impossible height above even Jyte’s towering shoulders. A grotesque paw rakes forward as though it possesses a mind capable of thought and action independent from the body. Its broken thorns lash the air where Jyte’s throat would be, but as they curl to deliver the decapitating strike, she cracks back like lightning, her walking stick leading the movement. It snaps the air and hits an open flank. 

It doesn’t so much as flinch.

A zephyr plucks at her clothes and stirs her hair alone, granting her the quickness to survive the fight. She drops low to the ground like a stalking cat, narrowly evading it again. Niikolais, barely breathing, rips a curtain through the temporal that drags the creature from her.

The beast struggles back to its feet and turns its gaze on him with terrible intent.

“Guard him!” comes Jyte’s command, her diction clear and sharp. 

“No!” Niikolais raises his off hand and braces to parry the creature’s strike, too late to deter Suvi from darting between. She pounces onto its foreleg, jaws scraping uselessly against bark, and is quickly swatted aside in a gout of fresh blood. 

He turns a second blow aside in a burst of violet motes, the act nearly wrenching his joints apart. A mirror’s image of himself coalesces from the magic sparking off his blade, weapon drawn, but the creature’s tail whips forward over its own back and stabs clean down through the head.

It turns its momentum on him again, but in a blink he’s elsewhere, slipping through the fifth dimension to reappear at a distance. Even as it lurches in pursuit, Jyte looses a concussive shot from her bow that pierces behind the wooden crest sprouting from its brow. 

“Now sic ‘em!”

Niikolais surges forward on an illusory leap to meet the charging Mordrem while Suvi dogs after its footsteps, gaining incredible speed. The chimeric blades score the bark, leaving it raw for the wildcat’s leaping bite, but again it throws her aside. 

He hears Jyte call Suvi back to her. So, too, does the beast.

She is shiny and mottled with dirt, sweat, and her companion’s blood, breathing hard as she scans the field beyond the creature. But Niikolais is no longer where she last spotted him, nor will she see him where he stands now, as he pulls on the shadows of the earth and steps into them, vaulting the felled trees obstructing the quickest path to ranger and pet.

Even wounded and stalking, each of the thing’s long steps consume more distance than Niikolais can match at a full sprint. Jyte scruffs Suvi and brings them both to their feet, her mercurial eyes locked on the approaching open maw. Shortbow broken or forgotten, she reaches behind her head and draws a greatsword as broad as Niikolais himself.

“Come, then, you who feasts upon corpses! I hear Raven’s wings beating against a broken sky; let the battle be joined!” 

She hacks with a renewed vigor at whatever limbs the Mordrem dares let get too close. She severs a claw and clefts its arm, then blocks too soon, and as she and Niikolais both realize it, time slows.

The stinger tail strikes, lashing in from underneath this time, and finds quick purchase in the tenderness of her stomach. It would run her through if not for the retreat she had already been cutting.

Still, she lifts onto her toes, eyes flying wide, as the thorn digs too deeply to ignore—then thunder cracks again and Jyte stumbles backwards, legs tangling with her ailing pet, and she falls to a cower before the beast. “Suvi, to me!” 

Niikolais’ insides turn to ice. The shadowy caul breaks around him and in the same instant, he breaks the ephemeral that rests between the Mists and Tyria and cuts the gap, but the thing’s tail sweeps back and takes his feet from under him. Suvi’s ghoulish yowl passes above him next, long and loud, a wail of tormented souls. Her body emits a sickening crunch as it lands. 

He cannot tell whether this time it has killed her.

Pure adrenaline is all that drives him now, pushing unsteady to his feet while the Mordrem unmakes his phantasms as quick as he can conjure them. The first splits down the middle, the second and third strike thrice across its back, then shatter into powder as the creature plunges its talons underground and ruptures the earth with a hundred flying thorns.

They slice through the trees, piercing his armour, splitting open his cheeks. He falls again and deflects the worst with a sepulchral mirror, but Jyte, already curled on the ground, cries out, then falls silent and limp.

There is no one else. Blinded by a dripping temple wound, he takes her greatsword in hand, then both hands, and pulls. Its weight bears on his shoulders, the buried tip dragging a trench in the already-broken ground, but where Jyte needed the blade for its power, he only asks for a conduit. As the greatsword finishes its trajectory, eldritch energy pulses forward in a selfsame arc, forcing the creature back as if confronted by a gale.

He screams with such a passion that he’s sure his vocal cords will tear. “That’s _enough!_ ”

Something _does_ tear. Beneath the creature’s feet, the jungle floor rips away, revealing an infinite span of the universe’s inner mechanisms. Untethered to Tyria’s remaining laws, its limbs crumple under gravity’s full glare, while simultaneously the utter absence of it floats it towards the canopy. Niikolais feels the magic, _his_ magic, dancing over his skin, pulling on his consciousness, making him numb.

Just as quickly, the rift seals closed, and the Mordrem crashes back. The telluric draw rips at its cracked body until the creature, unable to draw breath in a diminishing vacuum, releases a final baleful cry and goes still.

Stabbing his rapier into the ground, Niikolais releases a held breath and forces himself up again. He waits for a second, waits for its leap from false death, but it doesn’t come. Instead, Jyte makes a stirring sound.

He flies towards it, and even at a distance, he can see that she lies in tatters, thrown back half a mile by the vines that had downed her. Nearing her, the horrid lurch comes that it’s her breathing he heard.

The sound comes again, then again. An unholy bubbling wheeze, faster, shallower—Jyte’s realization seeping in through all the holes. And _now_ she isn’t wheezing, but gasping the desperate breaths of a woman who is drowning in her own lungs.

Now, right now, the Mordrem creature will not be what kills her. Nor will the jungle, nor the twisted seed in his heart that Mordremoth has been trying to feed. Right now, it will be no one’s hand but her own. Her body will kill her from the inside, and it will use everything it has to see it done.

Jyte is dying.

Right now.

——————————————

She sees the hall of spirits, where the brave live forever.

——————————————

Niikolais drops to one knee beside her. It gives a threatening snap as it’s forced to bend too fast, bear too much of his weight in a single stride. He catches himself on an elbow.

“Jyte—” 

She lay on her side with her cheek to the jungle floor, clouded gaze fixed somewhere to the left. Once he takes her face in hand, gently turning her onto her back, blown pupils tighten into pinpricks and begin the struggle to refocus. It takes a moment before they catch on him instead of slipping past.

There’s nothing but desolation in his voice. “Jyte.”

Recognition comes next. Slowly.

When it comes, Jyte’s smile is a hideous facsimile, little more than a show of blood-stained teeth that moves gradually closer and closer to a grimace. She instinctively goes to seek out the worst of her pain and brace herself there, but the moment she lifts her arm, an awful tearing comes from somewhere within.

Niikolais puts a brittle hand to her wrist and shoves it down again, quick as a spark. “Don’t move.”

“…Ah. Ha, haah.” Her eyes well up in a way he hasn’t seen a norn’s eyes do. “Well, nothing’s snapped off, has it, branchling?”

They could be no further from the breaking of the snowpack, this time, yet his head swims with a selfsame roar, as though he’d slipped back through time and found himself spliced halfway into that moment again.

“No—” he says, stumbling over his own tongue, “nothing yet—”

He can’t call to mind ever seeing her so utterly maimed. Mordremoth’s creatures are rabid, beings of utter depravity.

“We’re an hour’s march from Eastwatch,” he goes on, pressing his hands to her face and neck as he babbles. “Several pylons were still in need of power when we set out. We haven’t passed any Exalted making their return to the outpost, which means they’re still attempting to activate them deeper in the jungle. So that—lie still, lie still…” 

A crueler part of him feels quite certain this is the first he’s gone to touch her before she had already touched him, but it cannot be the only time, or he may die for the agony of it.

Jyte’s focus has drifted to the left again. “Branchling. Stop… fussing… and help me up.”

And watch everything in her fall out through her stomach? By the Tree. His love for norn and their ubiquitous pride has never felt more like a test of his own stupidity. “Jyte, please! I need to think! I’m trying to think.”

Some colour returns her sallow cheeks. 

“We cannot continue walking blind, only to falter.” This a reminder to himself as much as to her. “The creature is dead, but you’ll have to call Suvi back before anything happens to her. Stay with me now, dearheart. Right here.”

Jyte frowns.

“‘Dearheart’?”

“What?” His movement freezes. Staring down at her furrowed brow, he realizes that this is the moment she’d challenged him to reach. This is the way he bests her. Had she not known, had she not realized it? He makes a wavering sound, not one of breaking. More like the beginnings of a laugh. “Yes; ‘dearheart’—are you asking me—? Wasn’t it—Mother, wasn’t it clear?”

So long as she doesn’t speak, Niikolais can hear the path her breath takes through her chest. “Sometimes,” she says at last, thickly, “Sometimes, you could… stand t’ speak more plainly… Branchling.” 

_Branchling,_ like an afterthought.

The front of her trenchcoat hangs jagged, shining with blood that won’t dry until long after pack raptors or Mordrem find them. Beneath that, Jyte has been ripped down to gleaming bone. She looks like a bramble patch sprouted in her gut. The sight bowls him over with such a sickened dread that it nearly comes up.

“That’s a shame, given that speaking cleverly is my reason for employ,” he says at last, deceptively calm-sounding, and plunges both hands deep into her viscera. Jyte’s head snaps back, jaw clenching with such a force that it pops. “Cleverness just doesn’t work as well on stubborn folk like you norn. Stay still, I said—I can, I’ll fix this.”

_Please, Mother. Help me fix this._

Oh, it haunts the Dream, the suffering his race has endured. It began with Riannoc. First contact with the asura came not long after. Malomedies came back disfigured, one among few to return at all from Metrica that day. This time, it’s their own lineage that tortures them, eats their minds.

Humans are more fragile. He wrote letters of condolence, sometimes, on behalf of the queen. Humans fall ill and succumb to wounds he once thought inconsequential, to cold that’s too cold and to heat that cooks them alive. Sometimes to what seems to be nothing at all. 

But everything dies, and sylvari are no different. _Norn_ are no different, even if they prefer battle and their betters to take them. And though Niikolais had thought he’d been made to come to terms with that, over the long months he spent in her company, he cannot accept that a death now, and here of all places, would dare to deem itself to be that. 

Her… better.

Numbly, he drops another sliver into the pile growing at his side. One of many.

“Are you—done yet?”

“Not yet.”

There is no glory in this. What song could they possibly sing? If she dies here, then that’s all she’ll be: a name he will have to inscribe in his own hand, on a Pact memorial that the jungle will eventually reclaim. ‘Killed in the line of duty’. A footnote, not a saga.

More splinters. There are so many yet to go. And he feels his stomach turning.

What would wipe her clean from Tyria’s memory would be the very thing that created him, that sent her a death that darted up like a sneak thief, trading her nothing of legend. She’ll be one of many.

One of hundreds. He can already see it.

No. Not him. 

“You—get out of my head!”

The only answer he gets is the tolling that comes from within, never-ending. 

She had been grabbing at the earth each time he wormed after the pieces broken off deep inside, drawing furrows in the earth, but now even that has stopped. “Branchling…”

“ _Not_ —yet.” Raw, as if someone has laid him bare and stroked their fingers along his very nerves. Then, watching the blood bubble up around his fingers, he amends it to, “Not yet, Jyte,” because her name feels too precious just now not to use.

For a moment, he clutches his hands in his lap, trying to steady them, but they continue to tremble, so he wipes them against his thighs and begins the frenetic work of pressing her flesh back into the proper places. 

“Whatever gasconade it is you think I need to hear just now, reconsider it, and swallow it down until it stoppers up all these—these damned holes, I…”

His fraying composure is unravelling like lightning in his grasp, travelling uselessly through cuts of fat without deigning to at least do the work of cauterizing them. Mother Tree forbid he accomplish anything that doesn’t simply delay the inevitable in the most debasing way. 

Niikolais feels each loosening thread as it snaps. He feels each whipcording in a different direction while he kneels in the middle of it all, unable to pick one to chase after. He has tangled himself up in sinew instead.

What good will that do?

The Pale Tree has loved him from the moment he first stepped from the pod. Unconditional, ceaseless love, it was, and a gentle sort of pride; she has needed reason to believe in her children’s power to better the world. This has been the first time in his life that he has ever had to earn those things from someone, and it has _hurt_.

“Branchling.”

Niikolais fixes himself on the task before him, rather than the terrible greying of her complexion.

“Shut up,” he says, on the crushing edge of a plea. “Don’t speak.”

There’s nothing he wishes to hear when her voice is like this. No platitudes can make up for the way she _sounds_. 

As quickly as he wipes it down, the blood wells up again from rotting perforations he has no way to fill. No sign of stopping. How much more could there possibly be left? He’s knelt in a pool of it, coldly aware of the sticky heat of her life seeping into his breeches, that he’s feeling it leave her.

“Just give me a moment to _think_ , I beg of you—”

Jyte forces her fingers into the muddied ground and pulls. A handful of blood-fed moss and dirt come free in her palm. 

“Niikolais,” she growls, and before he can parse that it is his name on her tongue, she wraps that arm around him, smearing dirt down his spine, and as he’s brought against her, her shape erupts in stardust, radiating the luminescence of a thousand constellations.

——————————————

“What do you want, little one?” the Speaker had asked the norn girl at the Bear Lodge doors. He crouched to match her height and when he did, she’d seen the spirit of Bear crouch with him, the pelt of her kin resting across the elder’s great shoulders like the armour the norn knew Bear’s blessing to be.

Her own boots were lined with the fur from a grizzly. It made her proud to share something so important with the wisest shaman in Hoelbrak. 

“I want to be strong,” she had told him, proudly lifting her chin. “When I grow up, I’m going to become as strong as Bear, and then I’ll break Jormag’s tooth and lead us back home, like Asgeir led us here.”

The Speaker laughed and said, “A noble goal indeed! None since Asgeir himself have managed to damage the fang of the serpent, though many have tried. But perhaps you are the hero of legend we’re waiting for, little one.”

And Jyte, for that was the girl she had once been, had glanced towards the Great Lodge, where the tooth hung in wait for the one who would crack it. 

All norn looked to the day that Jormag would see their fury realized and fall dead into the Shiverpeaks’ unforgiving waters, and they all felt the longing in them to reclaim their lost homelands from its cursed grasp. But she would be the one to see it done, so long as she had the strength of Bear. 

“Yes,” she said. “That’s what I will be.”

She wanted nothing less and nothing more, and so, she was sure, this would be what would come to pass.

⸙ ⸙ ⸙

Seasons passed. The norn girl grew and earned a place in the Great Hunt, where she felled a minotaur bull and took its head as proof of her grand conquest. The foothills were alive with her kin, all hunting bigger prey than their usual drakes and frost wurms.

But when the others went on with Skarti Knutsson to the arena atop Hangrammar Climb, she had taken her trophy and her flagon to Bear Lodge. There, she sat by the hearth and drank.

Seeing this, the Speaker for Bear had joined her, and said, “Jyte, you have indeed become strong. But you have also grown, and the years have changed us. You’ve learned that the tooth is a lesson in humility as much as it is a testament to our history. Tell me, what do you want now?” 

He no longer needed to crouch. 

“I want to be cunning,” she confided in him, and emptied her flagon. “Like Raven. Like Eir Stegalkin…” She trailed off, staring into the flames, and the Speaker quaffed his own ale and waited for her to continue. 

“Every year, the norn at the Great Hunt grow younger, though we pursue the same quarries. If I cannot cut from the ice a new path for my legend, even the greenest hunter will eclipse what I’ve achieved.”

“There’s more to respect than winning the Hunt, Jyte.” The shaman ran a thumb across the minotaur’s horns, then set the trophy aside. “Wolf pups howl the loudest; after all, they’ve only just learned that they can.”

He reached across the table and patted her arm. The lines of his face were more pronounced than they had been in years before, but his smile had not lost the spirit she’d seen when a younger her promised to become like Bear.

“Yet if you feel the call of new roads stirring within you, then you are right to seek them, young one,” he said, so that gratitude and relief washed through her and left her drunker than the ale. “Perspective is key to understanding. I cannot speak for Moda, nor for Raven, but I think his spirit smiles upon you today. Stay true to your instincts,” he told her, “and nothing will stand in the way of your greatness.”

And this, she never forgot.

⸙ ⸙ ⸙

When Zhaitan fell, the world cried out its triumph and shook itself by the foundations. Asgeir had shown them that dragons could be cut, but it was the Pact commander, a sylvari, who had shown them that they could be killed.

Victory burned through all the night in each of Hoelbrak’s lodges, but it burned strongest and brightest in Bear’s hearth, which had felt colder after its havroun had fallen in Orr and risen again. When the norn woman stepped through the great, familiar doors, she felt its warmth sink eagerly into her bones, yet it did little to stoke the embers in her own belly.

She drifted through the drinking and the cheering, this most glorious gathering of visitors and norn in Hoelbrak since the Dragonspawn’s defeat, laughing seldom, but deeply when she did. Eventually she came across an elderly figure who sat by the fire.

“Alarrin of the Frost. Do you remember me?” she had asked the Speaker.

The last of his youth had left him since last they’d parted. But his eyes burned bright, still, and his memory needed no prompting. “Raven’s beak,” he’d said. “If it isn’t Jyte, the young one—though not so young anymore. It is good to see you here.”

He stood to match her height.

“What a sober face to wear on such a triumphant day! Fill your cup, daughter, and celebrate! With today’s victory, the morn of Jormag’s defeat approaches ever nearer.”

She sat, then, accepting ale and salted meat when passed to her. 

“Now, it has been many a year. Tell me the legend you have made for yourself.”

“I have built homesteads in the Timberline mountains and in Lornar’s Pass,” she said at last. “There, I hunt Jormag’s spawn, defend our territory from Sons who foolishly believe they can defeat us, and challenge the dredge that press north.” 

It was a hollow saga even to her ears. All norn did such things. That was the way of living in the Shiverpeaks.

“Your ambition has paralyzed you, Jyte. Even the sharpest hunter can walk only a single path at a time, however many she finds before her.” Alarrin placed a heavy hand on her shoulder. “Remember that all legends begin as a single deed. We cannot force the world to give us glory simply because we want it, nor can we steal our legends from someone else’s tale; instead, we must listen for those times our chosen paths hear us calling and ask us in return:

“‘What can I give you? What do you want, now?’” 

That was the last time he said this to her. 

There would not be another.

⸙ ⸙ ⸙

_You are dying,_ Tyria tells her. _You have been bested. You have been slain._

What was it that she’d wanted all this time? It hadn’t been this. Not the strength of Bear. Not the power of Asgeir, who had killed Jormag’s champion and rent Jormag’s tooth and yet still could not defeat the dragon.

 _Can you hear the song they will sing about you? What would you have them sing?_

Not the cunning of Eir, who had achieved greatness beyond all norn since Asgeir and yet lost it again, and, giving up in her shame and sorrow, fell into sentimentality for the days before.

_Will you end your journey here, snow-daughter, so far from your home? In a dragon’s maw, in a sylvari’s weeping arms?_

Not the watchful eyes of the Spirits of the Wild, who had guided her all her life through sleet and battle, yet now keep a silent vigil as she bleeds into the earth that speaks its last to her.

 _What would you have me remember?_ Tyria asks. _What do you want them to sing? Will you want for everything and yet ask for nothing? Would you have sorrow? Respect? Admiration? What do you want, snow-daughter? What do you want from me?_

 _Time,_ Jyte answers. _Give me more time._

——————————————

A horn blows in Tarir. All the jungle hears it.

Yet what resounds straight through to Niikolais’ soul is the lavender and flowering sage coming up all around them. They sprout, blossom, and etoliate; Niikolais trails his bloodied fingers through them as their petals begin to fall. They stain for an instant before it all burns away. The notches in his hands fill and fade. Between his knees, Jyte’s crosshatched stomach seals back together, replacing gore with half-healed cuts as from a day-old battle.

“Chin up, branchling. Don’t cry for me yet.” Her voice is thin, like a bolt of silk. He turns his face to her neck and breathes again, realizing only now that she’s told him not to that he has already begun to.

Shuddering inhale, steadier exhale. Once more, twice more, and on the third, when he lifts his face, dewy stars of his own hang caught in his stamen lashes. He makes sure they do not fall.

“Anything short of forever with you is not _enough_ , dearheart,” he breathes, “so don’t you dare leave me behind.”

The savagery turns his voice sable, carrying all the weight of a zealot’s edict. Niikolais doesn’t much consider them to be different things, anymore. This, he decides, will be his life’s purpose where the Dream has not deemed to give him something more. That no longer matters. He wants this to burn everlasting in her, until all the world’s days are gone to twilight and the final curtain draws. 

It will be the last enduring thing Tyria knows.

Jyte laughs weakly, holding back the cough that tries to take over. “You sylvari… everything becomes a vow.” She holds him so tight that he thinks he’ll break. To fall apart here, in her arms, would not be such a bad thing.

But she is warm and once again whole. Niikolais watches the starstruck pattern draw back from her skin, night sky disappearing beneath the blanket of a new dawn. 

“Yes,” he says, this the true vow. There is no one he would rather be promised to that has not already had him since before he awoke.

“Is that—you mean it.”

“I do.” Cupping her face in his hands, he catches a tremor beneath the skin that vanishes beyond his reach in an instant. “When have you ever known me to waver, Jyte?”

“Almost never.” The backs of her fingers brush over his cheek in turn, barely touching. Niikolais gives her a gracious, but tremulous, smile and eases back so she can rise.

“Come. Suvi needs you now.”

Nothing more needs to be said. Iron returns to the set of Jyte’s jaw as she looks past him and finds the wildcat, crumpled. 

“Move.” 

Wisely, he stands aside. At first Jyte limps and his heart aches, but then she runs. By the time Niikolais reaches them, she has knelt and gathered Suvi against her, cradling her into the crook of her neck as easily as lifting a babe. “Come back to me.” Her bloodied flank flutters more quickly, more shallowly. “I won’t let you die.”

“She hears you.”

“Of course she hears me,” Jyte says shortly, stroking the matted fur. “She is Snow Leopard’s. She is mine.”

Suvi’s huffing breaths become a purr, as though she not only hears her master’s voice, but understands it. “You were just playing dead, weren’t you? See, there we are.” 

He spreads his fingers over a velvet ear as Suvi squirms from Jyte’s arms. Finally, he might stop tending to the dread that has been building in him. “Thank the Pale Tree. I’d feared…”

His fear is drowned by the sounding of a second horn. This one blares for far longer than the first, unmistakably a call to arms, and he and Jyte turn their eyes west towards the city, a stillness coming over all three of them.

“The pylons will have to wait—we must return to Tarir.” Not without some urgency, Niikolais touches her shoulder, glad to see the flint in her eyes. “Hurry.”

He opens another rift in the temporal to bear them towards their final bastion. Mordremoth has called.

In answer, the jungle opens its mouth—and screams.

——————————————

vii. dragon’s stand

 

By the time the Pact pushes into Mordremoth’s heart, it has been so long since they’ve known something besides the drag of wet air on their lungs and sleepless paranoia that Niikolais can almost convince himself they’ve never known anything else. 

But the Tyrians who remain have been bolstered by fear and desperation. At last, they’ve run out of room for any more of it inside their hearts. 

The ground moves underfoot, the ferns shift in a breeze that they alone can feel, and the clouds draw in and break again like a champing maw. If any one of them falters now, they will never make it further, not at all. So it’s here that the Pact has chosen to make its final stand, to hold against the coming tide, and take back every inch that remains.

 _This_ is where they will fight and die. On a battlefield of their choosing, to a final rallying call that they alone sent up; it will not be because a dragon ripped them from the sky and tore sylvari minds to pieces. Niikolais has never seen anything like it before, and if the Pale Tree yet has the strength to smile on him even a little, then he will never see anything like it again.

“I don’t think I’m afraid anymore,” he hears himself say, a murmur that bleeds the honey-thick air. “Mordremoth cannot have—it will have nothing more from me. Everything from now is down to inevitability, one way or another.”

They move on towards a conclusion, one way or another.

“It will be a victory,” says Jyte. She stands next to him, leaned against twisted chopper parts. Above, a dozen canvas gliders creak and groan. 

The few skritt who survived their journey with the Pact fleet need a bribe before they take the fight any further. Wyvern crystals, they want, so a small group has set to work navigating the narrow cliffs and filling the skritt’s bags. Hoping Mordremoth won’t notice them.

Niikolais would help, but he would be another glider, another obstacle to avoid, in an already-crowded channel. He and Jyte wait with the others at ground-level, watching foot soldiers check and recheck the dolyak’s harnesses and straighten the explosives in the saddlebags; mindless, nervous tics that surface in a situation where neither violence nor contemplation offer respite. He would also be doing the same, had Jyte not rested a pointedly casual arm across his shoulders.

“Think of it like this: if Mordremoth could destroy us as easily as it wants us to believe it can, we would all be dead or in blighting pods by now.”

“Is that how you measure a dragon’s strength?” he asks weakly. He’s known her for months and still so much of her outlook makes his blood run helpless and fast and occasionally dismayed. “Whether or not it has killed us yet? What about Jormag?”

She spits. “Jormag’s next.”

“That isn’t what I meant.” 

“Well, that’s what _I_ mean. And I really mean it; we’re going to win.” She clicks her tongue at Suvi, who paces restlessly, and who ignores her. “Nothing so far has been enough to take us down. Mordremoth will have to try harder. And so long as it’s trying harder to kill us…”

Niikolais catches her meaningful glance and holds it close. These moments are a spark of understanding in what feels like an endless night. “Yes,” he breathes. “All eyes on us, then.”

Jyte nods grimly. “All eyes on us.”

And Valthika, Canach, Caithe—they will have to make do with that, should it make any difference at all to the thoughts that play so well at being their own.

Yet despite her bluster, Jyte thumbs her wounded wrist, tests the give to the iron splints she’d had stitched into her bracer at a crusader’s recommendation. She has done this since Tarir, and today her hand has barely left her own pulse. It must bother her, that each time she channels the druid’s power, more Mordrem invariably come out in droves and damage her arm again.

To a norn, it surely feels crippling.

“Dearheart.” Niikolais uses the pet name as a lure, to catch her attention so that he can take her hand and hold it, gently. “Let me see.”

Her eyes, though keen, calm for just a moment. She shrugs, one-sided, and helps him open the buckles holding the guard in place. “It’s coming along, branchling.”

Next to many of her flaxen kin, Jyte looks positively ruddy, but through hard combat and brazen misuse, the splints have given her stark bruises just the same. Niikolais taps a purpling bar with his thumb. 

“We nearly match,” he comments. 

“I got jealous,” she comments back.

He would stretch a pearlescent film over top, but even if he did, it would count for little more than slapping a bandage on, and he knows that for Jyte, the illusion of healing would be just that—an illusion, akin to nothing, and so it would do nothing for her.

“Jealous of my colouring? Please, I beg of you.” He tightens the buckles again, and she returns to watching Suvi pace. “I pale by comparison.”

“I don’t think you pale at all.”

Sylvari romance is nothing like trying to court a norn. She goads him. She laughs when he is at his most sincere. Does she take any of it seriously? There is a smirk growing on her face that makes him feel like she cannot possibly.

“Yes, Jyte,” he says, abruptly flustered— _bellicose_ , “looking at you is like looking at the sun. You will find I shall always turn firstly to you.”

She smiles even wider. “I may find that,” she says nebulously, “but not until later.” And she raises her voice at Suvi prowling back and forth at the ravine’s mouth. “Come on, now! Heel. It won’t be much longer.”

The gliders have begun to dwindle.

One remains airborne above them, punched through with holes from an earlier run-in with Mordrem snipers, and it circles like a vulture sizing up its next meal. When the soldier piloting it brings it haphazardly to land, Niikolais can see the sweat-slick brow beneath his helm, even at a distance.

“Hey—sorry.” He staggers at first, gulping down a few breaths. “Ugh. We’ve finally convinced Chakata to cooperate with us, so—gods permitting—it won’t be long before we get going. You two should get ready.”

Jyte straightens, arms crossed. “I’ve been ready this entire time,” says she, and the crusader gives her a wobbly thumbs-up in return.

“That’s great. Anyway, looks like Tactician Terque is conducting a final headcount.”

Niikolais glances thataway. The regiment has moved up in the time they spent bantering about bruises, and the Pact soldier hurries past them to rejoin it. His hand falls to his rapier. By now, it’s simply instinctive. “Jyte.”

In response, Jyte carves a whistle through the right side of her teeth. 

“Grab your equipment!” the tactician—a sylvari—bellows over the heads of a hundred men. “It’s time to move out!”

A quick and muffled horn sounds and anyone still alive falls or limps into line. Everything before now has felt chaotic—but this is a completely different kind. He thinks it may be the ghost of the Pact come back to haunt what destroyed it.

“Come on,” he hears himself say, as Suvi, suddenly at his elbow, begins to growl. “This way.”

“You feel the dragon’s eyes, don’t you?”

Niikolais swallows. “Yes.”

It’s as though the whole jungle has been holding its breath, and now it exhales. Niikolais feels himself shivering like dry leaves in a malicious wind. The heat is suddenly smothering, and the thunderclouds roil above them like a whirlpool forming in the sky.

He is a liar, he realizes. He’s still afraid. Afraid not for himself, but for Valthika, who has strayed further beyond the sane than any living sylvari has done. But he refuses to breathe a word of that fear until everything has ended and the time for fear is either passed or he has no need to breathe at all anymore. Otherwise it might poison his heart.

They have run out of time. Here is the final setting of the stage, and this will be what the historians remember, if any here survive to pass on the tale.

Strange, he thinks, that no one is shouting yet.

That will change, once they’ve left the camp behind.

“Don’t despair, branchling,” Jyte says with her lips split down the middle, cracked and bleeding, and she grins a nervous jackal grin he can’t quite match. Holding her hand will have to be good enough. It is good enough, here at the very last. “I feel the Spirits of the Wild pacing by our side.”

“What do they say?”

Jyte is slow to answer. She squints her eyes and lifts her face to the breeze, listening. Committing this final moment of peace to memory. “‘The time is now. Here they come.’”

He can hear them. Somewhere beyond the camp, hidden by the overgrowth the Pact couldn’t hope to clear a path through, but steadily getting closer. The crusaders leading the front line have drawn their blades.

And as the first straggling Mordrem climb through the broken field, the learned adage comes unbidden to his lips, scarcely more than a murmur before the drawing of the dark. “Hail to an axe age, a hero’s age, to the shade of a blood-red morn…”

Jyte breathes a laugh. “Now is the era the skaalds will remember,” she finishes softly, and strides forth. “Now comes dawning of the heroes of the norn!”

——————————————

Niikolais feels the dragon’s death. 

The call—already intractable, incomprehensibly twisted together with the synapses of his soul—spikes to a fever pitch that he knows will scream forever, without the need for air or a voice. A dying knell to tear down the walls of his mind _now_ if ever; one final, terrible act that roots him where he stands. 

It can’t last for long.

The onslaught around him screeches on, but in the closing moments of clarity, he has a Nightmare: he sees the solitary figures, unmoving, haunting an otherwise chaotic scene. Sylvari, all of them, standing gaunt and pale amid those soldiers whose lives are clamped between Mordrem jaws.

Now, as the dragon’s will flexes and inverts, exposing all their insides to the out, their trial reveals its true hand. Nothing before now compare to this pressure, such that it may overwhelm even the strongest of them through the sheer power of force.

Niikolais’ fingers fall limp around his rapier. It clatters to the dirt, a single note in his ears before he’s forced follow. First to his knees, then to his elbows, all of him warping in a back-breaking seize.

It can’t last for long. His own brain feels like it’s eating itself, ripping apart seams he didn’t know could be touched, making new seams where none had existed before. It only needs long enough to shatter him beyond all hope of recovery. It only needs now. It only has now.

And that’s why…

Everything, he realizes. The dragon will consume everything. 

Surely that cannot take long.

 

 

On all sides drums the frantic beat of push and retreat. Laranthir has not stopped calling out his orders. Some Mordrem vanish into the jungle without turning back, and fly at the Pact as though possessed, gibbering and wailing, unleashed by their master’s death—but for Niikolais, it all bleeds together, visually, aurally. It’s painful to watch, like trying to piece things together at a delay where he alone lags behind everyone else.

Someone lays straddled atop him. That much he knows. Their great frame covers him from stem to root as easily as the pod covers the seed, and their brow is wet from a gash that passes over their temple and into their hair. Even now, the Maguuma jungle is so oppressive that beneath the weight, the warmth, and the furs, for a moment Niikolais cannot breathe at all. 

He knows this person.

“…Jyte?”

They stir.

“Jyte.”

She’d thrown herself over him. Sheltered him from the storm. As the jungle dragon’s dying scream passes beyond his ability to hear, or feel, ever again, the heat wave at last begins to draw back, and he sees her smiling. The war has buffed her down from her usual gleam.

“Poor thing,” she says in a drug-out rasp, dropping her forehead to his. “I thought the dragon had claimed you at last.”

“No.” It falls from his lips as though leaded. The next words take some effort to work past the dryness in his throat, but conviction has strengthened them: “I’ve already given myself to someone else, I’m afraid. Elder dragons die alone.”

Jyte’s brows twinge. She draws her lips from her teeth, laughing once, damp the as sea spray on the cliffs of Southsun. He knows the look not from the faces of her kin, but of his, because the sylvari still experience the world with the rawness of an infant race. Without realizing it, he must have reached inside her and torn down the dam that held back the river.

She says, “Make no mistake that they will,” and unlike a sylvari who might wear the same tired grimace, her voice is cast in brass. “Not even Mordremoth could fathom the strength of the pack. Its foul imitations could never be the victors.”

So she claims, but it’s a wonder that Mordremoth hadn’t succeeded in taking her as it had taken Eir. Niikolais has not forgotten how it felt to have her entrails come apart in his hands. Doubtful that he ever will; the memory, like all powerful memories, will have become entrenched in the Dream.

He touches her brow. “You’ve been cut.”

A seed of dread—had it been him? Had he succumbed after all, even for a moment?

Releasing a harsh breath, Jyte pulls her weight back onto her haunches. All at once, he’s again in the thick of what had become a muted, faraway conflict. “A morningstar clipped me,” she mutters, as though taking a mace to the temple wouldn’t have laid a lesser man out flat.

Niikolais’ look is one of dismay as he rearranges himself to stand and return to the fight—and then he fails to, suddenly aware of a pain low on his right side. A muddy, throbbing heat between the ridges that mimic human ribs.

He looks down to see a tiny golden blossom spreading there. A darksteel dagger lies by his thigh, tipped with a single bead of sap. On the eve the Pact broke through the tangled depths and into this, their final theatre of war, Jyte had shown him this knife.

 _I’ve never used it,_ she’d said in a tone so tenebrous that it could have been sister to the steel. _I prefer my bow. But if the dragon’s call becomes too much, I will wield this dagger swiftly._

It had been that promise, grim but noble, which kept him rooted while they neared the heart of thorns. But now, the world falls apart at the seams regardless of it. The Mordrem retreat has become a rout.

Jyte catches the dagger before it’s kicked beyond her reach and sheathes it in the holster on her thigh. She stands, urging him up as she goes. “On your feet, now. The battle is not yet won.”

Niikolais seals the wound with a tiny bolt of ether magic. “It will be,” he says. “Soon.”

And winding her horn, she sounds a rallying call that howls through the primeval tangle. “For the glory of a new age! Cut them down!”

And Laranthir’s voice carries on the stirring breeze, crying, “Divert them at the blighting towers—pincer them between the two fronts, quickly!”

And the Pact diverts, and soon the cries of hundreds strong join the lashing rain. And inside his mind, it is blissfully silent. For the first time in an age, he feels only the Dream, and the Pale Tree’s quiet but comforting berceuse.

And…

A single mote of anguish, so far away now that he nearly overlooks it. Dwindling and shrinking from his tender regard, even as he reaches after to cradle it, until finally, like an ember too long beyond the fire, it suddenly cools and fades into nothingness with the feeling that a door somewhere has been closed forevermore.

——————————————

A limping, whipcord-tense procession files through the central advance camp. It salvages what it can, but in the wake of the Mordrem assault, there is little left but canvas and broken mortars. Jyte supports Niikolais beneath the right arm, trying to disguise how little she needs to slow her pace as compared to in the past. Her strength is flagging. 

For many of the other troops, however, it has already gone.

They walk as though they have all of them become Risen, weary and slow though they string up tight whenever they spot movement in the underbrush. Kill Mordrem flankers, survive the night, leave the jungle for dead. Single-minded tasks. Tactics are a resource they’d expended on the battlefield.

“A signal fire will alert the chopper pilots to our location,” the sylvari named Laranthir calls. His voice has rung clear and true through all the night, but the nearer they get to the dawning, the more his exhaustion causes it to waver. “Now that air travel has been secured, we can safely evacuate the badly wounded back to Camp Resolve. The rest of you, prepare to hold through until dawn at the forward camp. Remember, the Mordrem Guard are intelligent and can act independent of their master’s orders.”

Niikolais lays his head against her side, sighing. She hushes him much as she would a wolf pup. “Quiet, now.” 

The copters won’t take him back to the Silverwastes so long as she has any say, and Jyte will have plenty should anyone try to debate it. It has been her who has protected him, not anyone else—so tonight he will sleep safe in her arms, and nowhere else. There is nowhere in Tyria safer.

The Pact walks and scavenges and speaks in whispers. No more gibbering and mad laughter and battle cries, no more groaning earth. No more blighted vines building and unbuilding secret paths so the Mordrem could stage their ambushes. At long last, the jungle is listening for the Pact and its movement through it, instead of the other way around.

“Rata Sum is so close… if I had the aetherial converters necessary to build a single-use gate…”

“…haven’t seen Virri since before the blighting towers… you don’t think she…”

“…must have been smiling on me today…”

“What happened to your horn?”

“I’ll come back with you.”

“…hope the commander is alright.”

Spirits, it drags on her. Her heart cries out for a crisp tundra breeze and the carefree laughter of a moot after sundown. She leaves Niikolais for a time to help dismantle a tent. Then, to tend to those inside who hadn’t survived holding the backlines.

Some faces are familiar faces. It’s now that the burden finally falls to her to carry, when she’d stood above it for so long: she recognizes a human crusader named Jamie, couldn’t have been older than thirty, a swath of bright red hair and a gap-toothed grin. 

Jyte kneels over the body, unmoving for a long while, and finally draws the vigil’s cowl across her peaceful face. “On into legend.”

There is someone keeping record of the deceased. Jyte knows there is, remembers them being asura, but a name escapes her, so she draws aside the first human she finds and indicates the burying field. “Crusader Jamie has fallen,” she says, watching for recognition and feeling no satisfaction when it comes. 

“You mean Jamie Finn?” Their face, beneath the helm, is even younger than Jamie’s was. Made younger by their distress.

“I don’t know. We were sisters in battle, and no more.” Jyte is already turning away.

“Tactician? Skratch, has anyone seen Skratch—” The soldier raises their voice, moving at a stumbled jog past her and towards the dead and their caretakers, and she pensively presses her mouth to her knuckles as they go.

The Spirits watch her and listen. They stir the air around her. Her eyes fall closed despite her misgivings, the better to speak to nothing else but the wild. _Grant them your wisdom and strength to bear them through to morning light_ , she asks the silence. _We have,_ comes a voiceless conviction.

Satisfied, she puts her hands in her pockets and follows the troops drifting towards the narrowing of the path. “Everyone,” comes Laranthir’s voice as she nears, “we leave for the forward camp in five minutes! Finish your duties quickly and leave no one behind.”

“Niikolais!” Her own voice is surprisingly dwarfed by Laranthir putting up the call. “Suvi!”

Both sylvari and the wildcat stand on the fringes. Suvi ensures a healthy berth, and she could spot Niikolais even in the thickest battle. “I worry for Valthika,” he says when she gets close, falling in step with him. 

“He has his entire guild with him, branchling.” She holds out her arm until he reluctantly takes it. “If he could get to Mordremoth in one piece, if he could slay the dragon, then he can get out again. The entire jungle is in ruins.”

Niikolais doesn’t answer at first. “It’s not that, I don’t think.” He wears a look of almost mournful confusion. “I feel…”

“Tell me,” she prompts, but he remains adrift in troubled silence.

“An… aching…” He smooths his long fingers down her wrist and hand before releasing it. “I cannot explain it even to myself. My apologies.”

“I felt something,” murmurs a sylvari in battered plate a moment later, “when the dragon died. Did you?”

The golden-branched woman turns around and walks backwards in front of them, regarding them both with open curiosity. She doesn’t seem to care that she’s just admitted to eavesdropping. Her face, Jyte notices, has been scored by poisonous green and red, bitten deep.

A male sylvari walks at her side, and he nods, holding his own heart with the hand that hasn’t been bound in a splint. “The brambles snapped away and a new shadow passed over us. But there was no evil in it.”

“I thought it seemed like a cloud that comes bearing the rain.”

Niikolais nods vaguely. “Yes, it was… a little like that.”

“Will it be a cleansing rain, or one that washes us away?”

The first sylvari shakes her head. “I don’t know. Wait until you feel its drops falling on your branches and ask me again.”

Her companion frowns up at the sky and shakes his head, too. “I think by then I might sooner want to cry,” he says.

In time, the sylvari would find that he was right to suspect this.

⸙⸙⸙

At the forward camp, Jyte takes a tent for herself. The dead have been buried and the dying have been airlifted back to the Silverwastes. Everyone else is paranoid. Jyte doesn’t have the energy for paranoid.

“This is troll’s unguent,” she says as she coats her fingers with the paste. “I don’t know if it will work the same for your injuries as it does for ours, branchling, but there is no harming in trying.”

“I know what troll unguent is,” Niikolais reminds her hoarsely, and Jyte’s smile comes and goes as fast as a splash of quicksilver.

She closes his arm inside her fist and works the salve into broken bark. A burl will form there, eventually to heal over again as though the wound never was. The sylvari never cease to amaze. In fact, she’s quite sure the unguent isn’t needed, likely won’t speed the process any, but she feels better that Niikolais still allows her to do this.

She has been helpless to help him this whole time.

Once she reaches his elbow, she moves down again and takes his hand. Visions have plagued her since Tarir. Not the things of prophecy—she is no havroun—but not nightmares, either; rare that a norn doesn’t sleep soundly, when they do lay down the day and take a moment’s respite. Waking fears have brought these images to mind, hunting her doggedly in the daytime and leaving the dreaming hours for restlessness and wakefulness.

Fears of a time, up to now, where she would hear Niikolais’ slender boughs snap at last between Mordrem jaws, or would, upon joining the battle, feel his knife’s blade sink into her, knowing then she would have to end his life by her own hands. 

It would have been quick. And it would have been a kindness. And that has always been a promise, not a threat; that she and her kin would end a sylvari’s suffering in a moment, should any of them turn. He has outlasted what many others could not, yet the fear has hounded her from afar all the same, as fear must always do with the fearless.

Too craven to choke her with its own black coldness, but a near enough shadow that she’d still felt its thousand eyes. The jungle has made mongrels of them all.

Jyte doesn’t much like having new fears. One old one had been enough; one old one had been more than enough. She has cut him with her dagger, not a puncture up between the ribs as a killing blow would be to man or norn, but she’d felt darksteel split through the lettuce-like veins and tightly twisted roots made in the image of.

They have both touched the edge of the Mists and come back howling.

“Copper for your thoughts?”

Niikolais is tired and gentle as he nudges her knee with his boot. Her troubled wonderings cloud up and become hybrid, like stirring the silt in the bottom of a riverbed. Jyte is glad to let them go.

“Copper?” she asks, slow but inevitable to smile. “Too cheap.”

“Silver?”

“Too cheap,” she says again.

Silenced, he inspects her with a measured intent, unmoving for a time. Then he leans forward and tucks slim fingers into his boot. He pulls from the stitching of the side welt a long and sickened thorn, turning it so that it rests in his palm like a dagger. Niikolais holds it next in much more dispassionate regard, and when he looks back to her, his gaze feels like a razor’s edge skimming across her skin.

“I stole this,” he murmurs, “from a Mordrem I killed. It was to be mine to use and prove that we would not be harmed in such ways ever again.”

The weight of immense meaning rests behind the admission, and looking down at the thorn he holds between them both, she knows exactly when he would have had to have stolen it. She knows the serrated edge—remembers seeing them jabbing out through her belly.

“I meant to turn Mordremoth’s blade, had I the chance, and make the dragon feel what it is like to be made to destroy yourself.”

She nods, solemn. Eir had once done the same, and to immense victory, whether or not Niikolais has heard the tale of the Destroyer of Life and its primordial arrows. Once they again make camp in friendlier climes, she’ll regale him. But until then… 

Deftly he flips the thorn and offers it to her. 

“Are the spoils of battle payment enough?” he asks. “Jyte?”

Whatever the reason, he had taken a trophy.

At one time, she’d wondered if he would, but that had been back in the Shiverpeaks, back when he might have tried only to pacify the judgement of his character he’d believed himself subject to. This trophy is one she hadn’t seen him take, and he hadn’t told her that he had done so until the war was done.

Jyte rests her arms on her knees and lets her hands hang between, gazing at the thorn’s bloodstained edge as it, and everything, blurs out of focus.

What is a prize to a sylvari who cares little for personal things? Like Jormag’s tooth to her people, he describes keeping it like it constitutes a reminder. And if he were norn, if she is _dear-heart_ , then giving it to her now isn’t about having to earn her esteem anymore, but about wanting to.

Niikolais is still waiting. Meeting the slow softening of his gaze, she understands that he would wait forever.

I get it now, she thinks.

And she rises from her squat, and covers the thorn lying in his open palm, and kisses his mouth.

It’s softer than she had thought it would be, like kissing the cool flesh of a winter apple; malleable if she presses firmly enough. Rarely has she wanted to do something so deeply as she wants that. She wants to leave her mark upon his lips while they are still close enough to take a bite from.

“I was thinking…” she murmurs, and touches their foreheads together.

Firm-fingered, Jyte drags the thorn from him and tucks it into her pocket, where it will remain until the day it rots. Niikolais curls a slender hand behind her nape and pulls himself up against her. Close enough to kiss, though he doesn’t.

“Oh, _thank_ the Pale Mother,” he murmurs, with feeling. 

His clever eyes are fixed upon her, framed by those dark and terribly fine filament lashes. At last he lowers his face like those flowers on the vine that bow after the sunset, and like that, he rests his forehead in the dip between her collarbones, releases a held breath into the cut of her blouse.

Jyte has never been an adept planner. A norn’s natural inclination is to strongarm her way through the best and worst of all things, weapons-first if she must, but reading a situation while it unfolds around her, making a gut decision—these are things Jyte can do, through long years of necessity and choice.

She tucks her arms into the hinge of his knees and lifts him as she stands. Niikolais sways forward, steadying himself on her shoulders, but he needn’t bother; she has him in an iron grip. 

“Up you get,” she laughs, chin lifted so she can look him in the eye.

His face and throat flutter a beautiful, indignant rose.

Their kinship has always been fraught. The company they had made for one another before the fleet was torn down had been—complicated. She thinks better of trying to put it to words she possess neither the grace to know or skill to pronounce; in this way, Niikolais had been bound to prevail and eventually best her by passion and verse.

“Set me down, you ridiculous woman.”

Eventually.

Laughter spills out like the thaw that breaks the ice. Here, Tyria’s fate still balances so narrowly on a precipice that it would sound misplaced were she anything but norn. “Ask me again.”

Cleverer now than he was months ago, Niikolais skirts the snare traps she sets for him that he would have stepped in before. 

“Come here, dearheart. Come here.” He fans his fingers through her hair, brushes them across her brow, tips her face to him like it’s her that is the flower and he is the sun. There is tremendous care in every touch. “You are too far from me.”

He weaves his speech as effortlessly as the skaalds, odes told in dusky whispers to her alone, making something tender and other out of what they are. She feels his simple love of her thrumming in her chest like a distant avalanche. Jyte loosens her arm, allowing him to arrange himself more comfortably in the sling it makes for him.

“When have I ever gone far from you?”

A pained look flashes across his face. “Never again.”

His knees part wide around her torso. The differences in their size no longer appear to bother him as they once had. Booted heels find purchase and press down on the jutting of her hips, bracing him as he leans in from above and wraps his arms around her head and shoulders as gently as cradling a babe.

“Part your lips,” he breathes against them, and grinning tiredly, she spreads a palm across the small of his back and does.

He is, at once, both frustratingly gentle and far more solid and sharp than any other creature she’s held like this, with intent to kiss and make feel loved. He rests fully against her, though his weight is barely more than that of a child’s, and Jyte feels the vague tremors of some strange shake coursing through him, like autumn’s leaves in a stirring wind. Without the elasticity of real flesh and muscle, she realizes, sylvari cannot properly tremble. But Niikolais is trying, even if he doesn’t mean to.

She laughs again, deep in her throat, and he answers in love bites, the pinch of deciduous teeth plucking at her lip. In moments he has chewed her open—rather, she opens for him, willingly, breathing the air he perfumes simply by being in it. 

Most sylvari conscripted to the Wastes have by now dropped their petals, if they’d borne any before, but even unflowering sylvari like Niikolais carry the clean scent of a meadow before the bloom. It is a welcome respite from the jungle going to rot around her. The smell makes her miss the Shiverpeaks more than this barren heat ever could.

“Always get the cloths and threads, Titchkek,” comes a new voice, this one raspy and small. “Never get the shinies, Titchkek. Aaagh!”

The tent flap opens and a grey-streaked skritt slinks in, eyes bright, nose twitching. It beelines for Jyte’s medical pack and only sees her when she speaks, her voice akin to a distant rolling thunder for a creature so small. “Where are you going with that?”

“Aah! Big snow-lady shouldn’t sneak up on Titchkek. Dragon war everywhere. Many bad things to attack, yes.” The skritt suspiciously narrows its eyes at her. “Why a plant-man all the way up there? Plant-men fall from trees, not snow-men.”

Perched in the crook of her arm, Niikolais somehow manages to make himself look regal, as though he has every right and reason to be there. “I’m not falling,” he says. “I’m being held by someone I love.”

“Plant-man makes love at the snow-lady?”

Jyte guffaws a laugh that makes the already-twitchy skritt flinch. Niikolais turns a brighter rosy hue. “That’s—no, those are two different things.”

The skritt gazes up at him, unblinking. Then—“Embarrassed by skritt!” it crows, and, cackling, Titchkek vanishes from the tent with a flash of his tail.

“I think he tricked you into playing him for a fool.” The cultural divide is such that Jyte couldn’t find it in her to get embarrassed even if she were the kind of person who _would_. The only use embarrassment has is to satisfy everyone else that she’s properly regretful of her actions, which she isn’t, and skritt don’t care about being sorry anyways.

Niikolais swiftly changes the subject. “He took your supplies.”

“Mm.” Her smile melds with his cheek, then his jaw, then his mouth, for a brief moment. “They’re Pact supplies now. I’ll take them back later, if they haven’t all been put to better use. Maybe I’m not an ambassador, but I can be persuasive, myself.”

Skritt on their own are easily intimidated. So long as the object being argued over isn’t shiny.

“If you’re going to fish, be a little more subtle about it,” Niikolais chides. 

“I’m not fishing, I’m gloating.”

Grinning, she kisses him again. He responds in kind with little prompting, and she relishes in the soft, fleeting brushes of lips and petal-like tongue for as long as she can before curiosity wrenches itself out of her. “I know that taste.”

Niikolais looks confused at first. “The—? It’s nectar,” he says, and touches his own lips.

They are in every way, then, creatures of leaf and vine, despite the image the tree had made them in. It’s the same dull, almost stringent sweetness she might get chewing on red clover and lilac blossoms. Jyte lets her brow clear again. She has no reason to dislike it.

“Looks like I’m learning all your tricks, branchling,” she says in a grave undertone, but all it is is teasing. Jyte hasn’t lost her love for making him change colour independent of the changing of the seasons. “Good fortune to the Krytan queen! How could her enemies ever hope to outwit the mesmer with honey always on his tongue!”

And she laughs, because she’s amused herself with the image of a dozen humans in florid robes all clumsily scratching their heads and trying to figure how it is a single sylvari could win every last one of them over.

“I promise you it’s simply how sylvari are.” Niikolais is uncompromising. “You may think it a trick if you like.”

“Hmm. I like you, like this.”

She palms up his flank, prompting a quick breath that strikes her as both grateful and as telling her off without speaking. Lest she forget the days that were he resented so much as borrowing her wolf-pelt cloak, for all the intimacy the gesture had lacked. Bringing her palm to rest between his shoulder blades, Jyte clumsily kisses his temple. 

“I’ve a nectar of my own,” she murmurs, mostly to see his reaction to the idea, to see if he even follows, “if you wish to try it.”

To her delight, he stiffens, gaze turning askance so he won’t have to meet hers. “By the Mother, Jyte, _please_.”

Squeezing him tight in an inexorable grip, she hefts him higher, her cheek pressed to his stomach, and laughs a booming laugh that carries through the camp and would scale the mountains, were there any here. 

Let the Pact hear it. Let all Mordremoth’s surviving ears hear it, too, and know she yet lives to tear them down and bring them peace, using the same hands she was born with; strong hands, full of zeal and terrible, tremendous love.

“Are all sylvari so virtuous?” she asks, still laughing. Niikolais has loosened his grip on her shoulders, but the veins of his brow pulse neon pink. “Of all the souls I’ve met, you must be the most virtuous one!”

“This isn’t a matter of virtue,” Niikolais protests.

She laughs some more. “What _is_ it a matter of, then?”

He wrestles with his embarrassment for a moment longer before appearing to get the better of it, at which point he draws his fingers along her jaw, solemn-gazed, and presses his lips to her cut temple. Then he kisses her with his bloodstained mouth, and the heat the touch kindles in her will be an ever-burning flame. 

“Time, Jyte.” He kisses her again. “Just give me a little more time.”

——————————————

viii. the grove, reprise

 

The course of Tyria’s fate has been forever altered. 

Not much looks different, at a glance. That is the price they pay for victory. The land remains nearly unchanged, despite the great depths of its changing, and besieged by nothing that they could later liken to a second coming of Orr, Jyte is sure Tyrians will gladly settle in for a quiet aftermath and never pay mind to the new fangs they themselves have grown.

No matter how elusive, she will corner the beast eventually, as all great hunters do.

But Niikolais, by fate more than fortune, stumbled upon it first.

He’d written to her mere days after returning to the human city, calling it a cool welcome, ‘just shy of a killing frost’. As he had been when he’d left it, he returned to Divinity’s Reach a dignitary and ambassador, yet his peers stripped him of their confidence and soon also denied him a place as a conspirator among the courtiers and ministers—a place that they had given him, even though he had not asked for it.

Countess Anise and Queen Jennah insisted their faith in him never wavered, he said, but the measure had still passed, unanimously, for that was the way of human politics. They had had little choice but to heed the worries of the few, lest the ministers mistake fairness to him for the queen’s own nepotism. When the call had been made, he had raised his hand alongside all the others.

This is what he told her, and the letter oozed bitter sap on every line.

Jyte’s throat remembers her scoff when she’d read it through and the disdain flowed through her with only one way to get out. She’d crumpled the letter and almost tossed it to the fire. There would be no one else, she knew Niikolais would know already, who would argue against having a clever sylvari on their side. No one save those who had things they wanted to hide and saw an opportunity to bury the lead.

She wrote back and told him all that, said a great deal more about how he was better off away from their cloaks and daggers, before they found a new reason to try burying one in him, and he had written back in turn… a long and complicated letter that tried explaining the ministerial treason he had helped uncover before the summit.

Her response had been short, because she had been angry. _You see? They saw an opening._

The course of all their lives has been irrecoverably shifted. None feel it more keenly than the sylvari. It will not doom them; they are no longer set on a path towards any flame that she can see, but thus ends Niikolais’ life’s work. Thus ends the trust he had taken pride in and the courtship where he had found duty to uphold.

They have taken that from him without remorse, yet another casualty of the assault against Mordremoth. And by the Spirits, betime she corners the beast, it had best be among the last.

When she steps through the northern gate to Lion’s Arch, kicking off the ice from Gendarran’s snowfield, the city greets her with a cacophony of sound. 

Lion’s Arch is an alemoot that never stops. It has been ravaged so often that by now, it’s almost an act of defiance; music blares and moving water whistles through the air on pump and pressure systems. Salt sea breeze cuts the humid air while strays chase a milling crowd for scraps and hawkers shout over one another’s sales with the air of a brewing spat. 

But the sylvari she used to see flocking every stall and oddity from here to the Eastern Ward are either huddled by themselves in the shadow of the palm trees, or not around at all.

“Hey.” She cuffs the first idle merchant she sees, a human woman. She wears milkmaid braids. “Didn’t there used to be—uh, sylvari merchants around here? Shouldn’t they be back to their business by now?”

Less confrontational, if she makes it a question of coin and wares.

The woman’s cheeks tighten. She has to choose to look neutral when it comes to the sylvari, Jyte can tell—and to an extent, she succeeds at it. Her voice, however, falls flat. “Oh. I believe they decided to move on. Somewhere… north, I don’t know.”

Jyte’s frowns are fearsome things. They drag on her lip, a lopsided downward pull, and sometimes they bare her teeth—she gets the feeling that humans find it intimidating, because the woman gestures quickly towards the promenade.

“Other shops have opened up in their stead, so there’s really been no change to speak of. —Respectable ones!”

She frowns more. “Respectable?”

“Local farmers from Gendarran,” the milkmaid attempts. “I’m sure you’ll find what you need if you take a look around.”

And just like that, for just a moment, she glimpses the beast as it stands donned in a human skin. She becomes very aware of her hand on the woman’s shoulder and the fathomless black disgust that starts crawling down her spine.

She shows her teeth in a full grimace, rolls her eyes, and shoves past none too gentle. “Ugh.”

The most the woman dares to do is gasp. She doesn’t shove her back or call the Lionguard who are posted by the gates, which is how Jyte prefers it. She knows better humans who possess bravery beyond compare and have earned the reward of gentleness, but the milkmaid she will have forgotten by morning.

 _Such a brute!_ she overhears her hissing as she traipses towards the gate hub. _Really, who does she think she is?_

Jyte rolls her eyes again and doesn’t stop until the gate that connects to the Grove has taken the last of her coin and sent it to rust in the vaults of Rata Sum.

⸙⸙⸙

Wyld Hunts are a monumental endeavour. They consume sylvari lives, if they are not of themselves impossible, and often sooner to see to their champions’ ends than the other way around.

Some days, like today, that eidolon rests cold and heavy alongside all the other ghost stories Jyte could tell. She has listened, and now watched, while a fledgeling race walked through fires their own creator set before them, and in the time it has taken to reach the other side, their heroes have turned to dust.

All but one. For Niikolais’ sake, she hopes that does not soon change.

Names are what remains of sylvari heroes, and there had not been many to begin with. Wynne. Killeen. Riannoc, who had wielded Caladbolg and became immortalized in the stars. Now Trahearne, who had also wielded Caladbolg and also died.

Spirits, the only stories the sylvari seem to have of late are stories about their dead. She has met many legendary norn, but their heroes? The closest she’s come is drunkenly teasing the Pact commander, both of them feisty as a drake’s breakfast.

And… this.

She catches the dead marshal’s eye. He stands tall and ever-watchful, with patience upon his brow, overlooking the Caledon path—and there he will stand forever. Living but not living. Immortal.

Eir will be next.

Jyte smiles with one corner of her mouth and gives the firstborn a two-fingered salute. “I will see you among the stars, my friend.”

Goodnight, Owl.

Goodnight, Eir.

Goodnight, firstborn.

For some, there is no coming back home. 

For Jyte, the great sylvari heroes are all as ephemeral as a dream.

⸙⸙⸙

She spends a while wandering many helixes and pathways. All memory of what was where has left her—she’d wager it had left her in order to make room for the drink the very same night Niikolais had shown her around.

But she’ll learn again. Of that, she holds no doubt.

When at last she finds herself, against all odds, back on the same floor as the asura gate and living statue, Jyte is so turned about that she decides she may as well lose all sense of discretion and dignity, as well.

She stoops to lean back on a mushroom sprouting from a nearby hut and watches the Grove as closely as its citizens often watch her. But the minutes pass and she still can’t drum up any more than a vague recollection of lambent flowers and Niikolais’ somber face when he’d bade her good-bye, so she finally settles on a sylvari who looks vaguely merchant-like and taps them on the shoulder. 

“Lavender nectar, if you have it. Sorry. Excuse me. Lavender nectar.”

He laughs, though there is an undercurrent of sadness there she hopes she doesn’t have to hear in all their voices today. “No, _I’m_ sorry, stranger,” he says, “but I haven’t what you need. I don’t sell anything, I’m afraid. You want Elenwen, most likely. She’s over there.” And he points to an apple-red sylvari standing amid a cluster of massive flowers about to bloom.

“Of course that’s who I want.” Jyte keeps it to an undertone. “Hey, there. Elenwen, was it?”

The sylvari straightens up at her approach. Her cheeks are coated in pollen. “Yes! My greetings to you!” Like most sylvari, her first instinct is to stare. “…Sticks and shoots, forgive me. My mind is everywhere at once these days—you must be here to purchase something from me.”

Jyte smiles faintly. 

“Yeah—lavender nectar, if you have any.” 

“Goodness,” the merchant comments, bobbing her blossoming head, “that’s a particular one! Are you expecting a special moment?”

“Not exactly,” says Jyte, then, after a moment’s consideration, adds, “More like I’m repaying a thought.”

“It must have been a kind thought.” She turns and runs her cleft hands over the flower nearest her, and as though her touch alone conveys the same power as the sun, its petals part with a gentle, low rustling. Jyte cranes her neck and sees several bottles and baskets nestled inside.

“Oh, pollen powder,” Elenwen sighs, touching each bottle as she does, “it seems I only have lavender-rose nectar, but not either one of those alone. Do you mind?”

The corner of her mouth lifts a little higher.

“That’s fine.”

This sylvari is so small and slight and bright-eyed that it comes a surprise. Maguuma had sapped that from too many of them. But Elenwen acts new to the world, now a world where she will never have to fear Mordremoth’s call or know firsthand the hate for her kind that had lain inside all hearts, both good and bad.

Elenwen takes a moment to wrap a golden stem around the neck of the bottle and arrange it just so, and Jyte’s smile grows some more. 

“It’s just a few copper, I just like to add something special, so don’t worry about that.” 

She reaches up the considerable difference between them and passes the bottle over. And as Jyte drops the coins into her palm and their hands touch, the sylvari gives a little start, as though recalling a long-forgotten memory. 

“Oh, cherry, _that’s_ it,” she says. She perks up like a flower after the rain. “I thought it might have been you—sometimes I think I see things that are not, but I’m sure of it this time. I know your face from my Dream!”

That makes Jyte stop. Stop completely. Down to her muscles and breathing and the perpetual, shifting adjustments of her stance. A shiver skates up her spine and down her arms and lightning-bolts to the tip of each finger on each hand before zipping back the way it came. It’s electrifying and gratifying and unnerving at once.

“Sorry,” she says dumbly, “I don’t know you.”

“No, most people don’t!” Elenwen beams. “I like the Grove very much, and this is only the autumn of my first season, besides. But you are the norn from the glacier, aren’t you? You protected the sylvari in the far jungle, you and your people. But I remember your face the clearest.”

“‘From the glacier’?” Suddenly, Jyte gets the irrational urge to laugh, loud and from as deep in her belly as laughter can come from, and to keep laughing until her sides ache and tears run down her face. “How is that, then?” she manages to ask straight-faced, mouth trembling as she resists the elation that has every intention of coming forward.

“Well,” the sylvari says thoughtfully, “sometimes my brothers and sisters see something that’s very important to them, that they believe should be shared with all sylvari, so they show the memory to the Dream, and to all of us who haven’t yet awakened. Then, when we do wake, we wake knowing of those things already, whether they happened years ago or that very morning.”

Jyte remembers pieces of this doctrine. Niikolais had looked to the Dream—and those very same memories, she supposes—for the same guidance and purpose, that so many of his kin were handed.

“We don’t have children, you see,” continues the merchant, evidently quite happy to be the one to do the explaining for once, “so we must learn what and how to be even before we sprout. Everything that the Dream shows us is to prepare us to step already full-grown into an ever-changing world.”

“And all of you see those things?”

“No, no, no. That would be a bit much. I suppose it is like drawing water from a well; we all drink well water in the end, but it is not the same water in all our cups.” Seeing Jyte’s quick squint, she adds, “I know you, and others will know you as well, but if everyone knew, wouldn’t that be a little strange? I’d simply wilt under all that pressure!”

Jyte bites her lip. “What… what exactly did you see,” she ventures to ask, trying to politely word herself as she goes. “Of, of me? You are sure it’s me that you saw?”

Elenwen looks at her very closely for a moment and says, “Oh, yes. You had a… bobcat with you, sometimes, and you walked with this—a, a lovely staff that had all sorts of animals carved into it.” 

She adopts a barrel-chested stance and walks back and forth beside her flower-stall, miming the exaggerated use of a walking stick. Jyte brings the back of her hand to her mouth and chuckles into it, watching a display that would enrage some Hoelbrak norn. 

“Just like that, huh…” The lumbering pace the sylvari sets reminders her more of a charr with a bad hip.

“Like that! And I remember that you were a bear, once,”—the sylvari’s voice takes on an awed hush—“and you felled this _terrible_ beast of thorns and teeth with the Pact commander’s brother…”

 _A legend,_ comes the thought, unbidden, _A legend begins with a single deed._

And what a deed it was, Alarrin, she would say if the shaman stood before her now, but instead she faces a verdant sylvari with honey-gold eyes. She kneels down and rests her hand upon a delicate crested shoulder.

“Yes!” she cries. “I am Jyte, of the glacier. I have stood upon a dragon’s spine and felt it tremble beneath my feet. Ancient druids have whispered their secrets to me, and I have bested death even as it clutched me between its teeth. My love—”

And she stops herself, boastful grin re-emerging as something with far fewer teeth. She doesn’t need to say it aloud. Indeed, some of her most ardent love is not for anyone else to hear. But Jyte has love abound, and Niikolais has made sure to immortalize it.

“That reminds me,” she says instead, “where’s this… omphalos chamber of yours? Niikolais asked me to meet him there.”

“Niikolais…” The sylvari perks again. “The omphalos chamber? By the Tree, that’s wonderful! It’s just over there; you just ride the pod straight up.”

She points towards a great seed hanging suspended below a gap in the tree’s even greater roots.

Her heart has begun to beat faster. “Yeah? Why’s that?”

“Because,” says Elenwen, with the same eagerness as someone who has been given the honour of breaking some delightful news, “he’s taking you to see our mother.” 

And Jyte can feel the boughs of her love burst into bloom all around her, possessing every inch of her heart, happily; a love that has been cultivated and allowed to grow wild where it will. A love that, from now until her dying day, will be capable of piercing all doubt.

And Jyte laughs. 

“It’s about time,” she says.

_fin_


End file.
